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CHAPTER 3 LANGUAGE TRUTH AND MUSIC

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CHAPTER 4 THE NATURE OF THE TWO WORLDS

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Our attention is responsive to the world. There are certain modes of attention which are naturally called forth by certain kinds of object. We pay a different sort of attention to a dying man from the sort of attention we’d pay to a sunset, or a carburettor. However, the process is reciprocal. It is not just that what we find determines the nature of the attention we accord to it, but that the attention we pay to anything also determines what it is we find. In special circumstances, the dying man may become for a pathologist a textbook of disease, or for a photojournalist a ‘shot’, both in the sense of a perceived frozen visual moment and a round of ammunition in a campaign. Attention is a moral act: it creates, brings aspects of things into being, but in doing so makes others recede. What a thing is depends on who is attending to it, and in what way. The fact that a place is special to some because of its great peace and beauty may, by that very fact, make it for another a resource to exploit, in such a way that its peace and beauty are destroyed. Attention has consequences.

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One way of putting this is to say that we neither discover an objective reality nor invent a subjective reality, but that there is a process of responsive evocation, the world ‘calling forth’ something in me that in turn ‘calls forth’ something in the world. That is true of perceptual qualities, not just of values. If there is no ‘real’ mountain, for example, separate from one created by the hopes, aspirations, reverence or greed of those who approach it, it is equally true that its greenness, or greyness, or stoniness lies not in the mountain or in my mind, but comes from between us, called forth from each and equally dependent on both; as music arises from neither the piano nor the pianist’s hands, the sculpture neither from hand nor stone, but from their coming together. And then the hands are part of the lived body – or, put more conventionally, are the vehicle of the mind, which is in turn the product of all the other minds that have interacted with it, from Beethoven and Michelangelo down to every encounter of our daily lives. We are transmitters, not originators.

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Our attention is responsive to the world, but the world is responsive to our attention. The situation presents a paradox for linear analysis, like M. C. Escher’s hand that draws the hand that draws the hand … (see Figure 4.1).

This paradox applies to the problem of how we get to know anything, but is peculiarly problematic for the special case whereby we are seeking to approach the very processes whereby knowledge itself comes into being. It is not possible to discuss the neuropsychological basis of our awareness of the world without adopting a philosophical position, whether or not one is conscious of doing so.1 Not to be aware of doing so is implicitly to have adopted the default standpoint of scientific materialism. Unfortunately, according to this position, one of the hands in Escher’s picture must come first.

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Neuropsychology is inextricably bound up with philosophy. In recent years this has been increasingly recognised, more by philosophers than neuroscientists, with one or two important exceptions. Some of these developments are very much to be welcomed. However, all too often there is a potentially treacherous, because undetected, process at work. What science is actually doing when it delivers its revelations goes unexamined: the scientific process and the meaning of its findings is generally taken for granted. The model of the body, and therefore the brain, as a mechanism is exempted from the process of philosophical scepticism: what it tells us becomes the truth. And, since the brain is equated with the mind, the mind too becomes a mechanism. The philosophical world view is brought into line with that, and reveals – the truth of the mechanical model as applied to brain and mind. As a result, in a spectacular hijack, instead of a mutually shaping process, whereby philosophy interrogates science, and science informs philosophy, the naïve world view of science has tended by default to shape and direct what has been called ‘neurophilosophy’.

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If the world of the left hemisphere and the world of the right hemisphere are both present to the mind, and form coherent aspects of experience, should we expect to find the resultant incompatibilities reflected in the history of philosophy? The hemispheres have different answers to the fundamental question ‘what is knowledge?’, as discussed in the last chapter, and hence different ‘truths’ about the world. So on the face of it, yes. But the default approach of philosophy is that of the left hemisphere, since it is via denotative language and linear, sequential analysis that we pin things down and make them clear and precise, and pinning them down and making them clear and precise equates with seeing the truth, as far as the left hemisphere is concerned. And since the type of attention you bring to bear dictates the world you discover, and the tools you use determine what you find, it would not be surprising if the philosophical vision of reality reflected the tools it uses, those of the left hemisphere, and conceived the world along analytic, and purely rationalistic, lines. It would be unlikely for philosophy to be able to get beyond its own terms of reference and its own epistemology; and so the answer to the question whether the history of philosophy would reflect the incompatibilities of the hemispheres is – probably not.

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If there were, however, evidence that, despite this, philosophers had increasingly felt compelled to try to give an account of the right hemisphere’s reality, rather than the left’s, that would be of extraordinary importance. Admittedly, trying to achieve it at all using the conventional tools of philosophy would be a bit like trying to fly using a submarine, all the while making ingenious adaptations to the design to enable one to get a foot or two above the water. The odds against success would be huge, but the attempt alone would be indicative that there was something compelling beyond the normal terms of reference, that forced one to make the attempt. This would be far stronger evidence for the ultimate reality of the right hemisphere’s world than any amount of philosophy that confirmed the left hemisphere’s reality, which would be only to be expected.

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What I shall argue in this chapter is that precisely such a development has in fact occurred in philosophy, and that it has been evident in the work of the most influential philosophers of our age. Such a development seems to me as striking as the developments in mathematics and physics since the 1880s to which it is in some important respects a parallel. It’s hardly surprising that scientific method for a long time led to a vision of the universe – the Newtonian universe – which reflected the principles of the scientific method. But when it began to compel conclusions incompatible with the model assumed by its method, a ‘paradoxical’ universe, that was a more revealing finding. In the late nineteenth-century Georg Cantor struggled with the idea that there was a necessary uncertainty and incompleteness to the realm of mathematics. Infinity was no longer tameable by turning it into an abstract concept, giving it a name, and then carrying on as though it were just another number. He came to the realisation that there is not just one ‘infinity’, but an infinity of infinities, beyond anything we can capture or re-present, something that was real, not just taking series ‘as far as they will go’, but beyond; something Other in nature than the series that tried to reach it, and that could in principle never be reached by any kind of known cognitive process. His contemporary Ludwig Boltzmann introduced time and probability into the timeless and certain realm of physics, showing that no system can be perfect; Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorems proved that that would always inevitably be the case, that there will always be truths within any system that cannot be proved in terms of that system. Niels Bohr’s ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ of quantum mechanics and Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle established a universe in which uncertainty is at the core, not just a product of human imperfection, to be remedied in time by advances in learning, but in the very nature of things. Though the insight or intuition that led them to these discoveries came, I suggest, from the right hemisphere, or from both hemispheres working together, in every case their conclusions followed clearly from left-hemisphere processes, the logic of sequential analysis. These transformative developments nonetheless validate the world as given by the right hemisphere, not

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To return to philosophy and the brain, we should expect them to illuminate one another: philosophy should help us understand the nature of the brain, and the nature of the brain should help to illuminate philosophical problems. There are three questions in particular worth asking here. Has what we know about the hemispheres anything to offer in illuminating philosophical debate? Equally, does philosophy help make sense of the hemisphere differences we know exist? And what can the answers to both questions tell us about the nature of the brain?

The first question takes us into deep water immediately. Philosophers themselves will be the best judges, and the issues are as extensive and complex as the mind itself. However, some possible areas for discussion naturally suggest themselves.

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In Western philosophy for much of the last two thousand years, the nature of reality has been treated in terms of dichotomies: real versus ideal, subject versus object. Over time the meanings of the terms, and sometimes the terms themselves, have changed, and the constant need to transcend such dichotomies has led to modifications and qualifications of the kind of realism or idealism, the type of objectivism or subjectivism, but the essential issue has remained: how are we to connect the world and our minds? Since our world is brought into being by two hemispheres which constitute reality in profoundly different ways, it might seem likely that some of these dichotomies could be illuminated by the differences between the worlds each of the cerebral hemispheres brings into being.

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It has nothing to do with the idea that, for example, one hemisphere might be subjective and the other objective. That’s obviously untrue. Rather the point is that philosophy in the West is essentially a left-hemisphere process.2 It is verbal and analytic, requiring abstracted, decontextualised, disembodied thinking, dealing in categories, concerning itself with the nature of the general rather than the particular, and adopting a sequential, linear approach to truth, building the edifice of knowledge from the parts, brick by brick. While such a characterisation is not true of most pre-Socratic philosophers, particularly Heraclitus, it is at least true of the majority of philosophers since Plato in the West until the nineteenth century, when, for example, Schopenhauer, Hegel and Nietzsche began to question the basis on which philosophy made its advances. Philosophy is naturally given, therefore, to a left-hemisphere version of the world, in which such divides as that between the subject and the object seem especially problematic. But these dichotomies may depend on a certain, naturally dichotomising, ‘either/or’, view of the world, and may cease to be problematic in the world delivered by the right hemisphere, where what appears to the left hemisphere to be divided is unified, where concepts are not separate from experience, and where the grounding role of ‘betweenness’ in constituting reality is apparent. The key to such philosophical dichotomies lies not, then, I suggest, in the division between the hemispheres, but within the nature of the left hemisphere itself.

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If one had to characterise the left hemisphere by reference to one governing principle it would be that of division. Manipulation and use require clarity and fixity, and clarity and fixity require separation and division. What is moving and seamless, a process, becomes static and separate – things. It is the hemisphere of ‘either/or’: clarity yields sharp boundaries. And so it makes divisions that may not exist according to the right hemisphere. Just as an individual object is neither just a bundle of perceptual properties ‘in here’, nor just something underlying them ‘out there’, so the self is neither just a bundle of mental states or faculties, nor, on the other hand, something distinct underlying them. It is an aspect of experience that perhaps has no sharp edges.

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Zeno’s paradoxes. Originating with Zeno of Elea (c. 450 BC):

Achilles and the tortoise. In a race in which Achilles gives the tortoise a head start, Achilles can never overtake the tortoise, because first he has to reach the point where the tortoise began, then the point the tortoise reached while Achilles reached the tortoise’s starting point, and so ad infinitum.

The dichotomy. We can never move at all, because first we have to get halfway to where we are going, but before that, a quarter of the way, and before that an eighth, and so ad infinitum.

The arrow. An arrow fired at a target cannot move, because, at any one moment, the arrow either is where it is, or it is where it is not. If it remains where it is, then it must be standing still, but if it moves where it is not, it can’t be there. So it cannot move at all.

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Heraclitus (like the Oriental philosophers who influenced Greek thought until Plato) was unperturbed by paradox, taking it as a sign that our ordinary ways of thinking are not adequate to the nature of reality. But around the same time that the Platonic mode of discourse, with its insistence on the Law of the Excluded Middle,3 came into play – as, in other words, thinking became philosophy in the accepted sense – paradox started to emerge as a focus of intellectual disquiet. Some of the most famous are:

The sorites paradox (from Greek soros, a heap). Thought to have originated with Eubulides of Miletus (c. 350 BC). If one grain of sand is not a heap, and at no stage adding one more grain of sand is going to make the difference between not being a heap and being a heap, how can it ever be that (by, for example, the time 100,000 grains are reached) a heap has come into being?

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The Ship of Theseus paradox. Plutarch wrote in his life of Theseus:

The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place, insomuch that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.4

The reference to Demetrius Phalereus dates this from about 300 BC. The ‘logical question of things that grow’ alluded to, known usually as the ‘Growing Argument’, is the basis of numerous paradoxes, such as Chrysippus’ paradox, the point being that, as things grow, at least one particle is added to them or lost by them, and so, according to one interpretation, they cease to be the same entity. In effect all living things present this problem, that of a thing that flows, since they are always in a state of change and self-repair. (As the German philosopher Novalis was to put it 2,000 years later: ‘There is no doubt that our body is a moulded river.’)5

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The Epimenides paradox. Named after Epimenides of Knossos (c. 600 BC), a possibly mythological Cretan seer, who wrote in a light-hearted poem or song that ‘Cretans are always liars’ – false if true, true if false. It seems that this only started to look like a real problem when examined retrospectively by later Greek writers.

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Looked at with an understanding of the different worlds disclosed by the two hemispheres, the development of paradox starts to make sense. There is a sudden obtrusion of the left hemisphere’s take on reality, which then conflicts with the right hemisphere’s.

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Take the sorites paradox. This results from believing that the whole is the sum of the parts, and can be reached by a sequential process of incrementation. It tries to relate two things: a grain of sand and a heap, as though their relationship was transparent. It also presupposes that there must either be a heap or not be a heap at any one time: ‘either/or’ are your only alternatives. That is the left-hemisphere view, and sure enough it leads to paradox. According to the right-hemisphere view, it is a matter of a shift in context, and the coming into being of a Gestalt, an entity which has imprecisely defined bounds, and is recognised whole: the heap comes into being gradually, and is a process, an evolving, changing ‘thing’ (this problem is related to the Growing Argument). Failure to take into account context, inability to understand Gestalt forms, an inappropriate demand for precision where none can be found, an ignorance of process, which becomes a never-ending series of static moments: these are signs of left-hemisphere predominance.

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Or the Ship of Theseus. Here again the problem is caused by a belief that the whole is the sum of the parts, and disappears as the parts are changed. There is also a belief that there must necessarily come a ‘point’ in a process where identity changes. The fact that this type of paradox was known as the Growing Argument (auxanomenos logos) demonstrates that there is a difficulty here in dealing with all living, changing forms. All, once more, points to a dominance of the left-hemisphere view over that of the right.

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Zeno’s paradoxes similarly rest on the adoption of the left hemisphere’s view that every flowing motion in space or time can be resolved into a series of static moments or points that can then be summed to give back the living whole. The ‘seamless’ fluidity of motion in space or time is ‘reduced’ to a series, akin to the series of still frames in a ciné film. This is what happens to subjects who suffer right-hemisphere damage, and develop palinopsia (see p. 76 above). This fragmentation of experience is also what underlies delusional misidentification, another right-hemisphere-deficit syndrome, where the seamlessness, the individual quiddity, of a living being, is broken down into a series of manifestations, taking us back to the Growing Argument: my wife one day is not the same person as my wife the next.6

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The Cretan liar paradox is a little different, but here, too, the problem is caused by relying on the left hemisphere only to construct the world. It does so by rules, and with precision. Meanwhile, the right hemisphere, like Achilles in real life, overtakes the left-hemisphere tortoise in one effortless stride: right-hemisphere pragmatics mean that we know precisely what Epimenides is getting at. We don’t have to get hung up on the rules. In the real world nothing is absolute, and with a lack of pedantry appropriate to the fact that his remark actually comes from a poem, and is probably humorous in intent, since he is well aware that he is a Cretan, we understand that Epimenides has stepped outside the frame for a moment, to take a look at the people he belongs to. In real life one has come across people who take humorous remarks literally, or who laboriously attempt to replace understanding by the application of absolute rules and come up with a paradox, and they are usually somewhere along the Asperger spectrum. It looks like right-hemisphere failure again: misunderstanding of context, lack of humour, lack of flexibility, insistence on the certainty obtained by rules. What this paradox also illuminates is that any enclosed, self-referring system the left hemisphere comes up with, if taken strictly on its own terms, self-explodes: there is a member of the system that cannot be accommodated by the system.7 There is always an escape route from the hall of mirrors, if one looks hard enough.

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Paradox means, literally, a finding that is contrary to received opinion or expectation. That immediately alerts us, since the purveyor of received opinion and expectation is the left hemisphere. I called it a sign that our ordinary ways of thinking, those of the left hemisphere, are not adequate to the nature of reality. But – wait! Here it seems that the left hemisphere, with its reliance on the application of logic, is stating the opposite: that it is reality that is inadequate to our ordinary ways of thinking. Contrary to received opinion, it asserts, arrows do not move, Achilles cannot overtake the tortoise, there can never be a heap of sand, Theseus’ ship is not really his ship after all, Epimenides was inevitably talking nonsense. In other words its understanding of paradox is – not that there must be problems in applying this kind of logic to the real world – but that the real world isn’t the way we think it is because logic says so. This looks like an interesting usurpation, a swapping of roles, with the new dispensation redefining who is Master, and who emissary.8

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Problems arising from whether we see the world as a process, always in flux, or as a series of static, finished, entities, have inevitably persisted in philosophy. In the Middle Ages it was acknowledged in the distinction between the world seen as natura naturans, nature ‘naturing’, doing what nature does, a process ever evolving, and to that degree unknowable, and natura naturata, nature ‘natured’, a something completed, perfect (which always implies past tense, an arrest of the flow of time), static, knowable. Spinoza was one of the few philosophers, apart from Pascal, between Plato and Hegel to have a strong sense of the right-hemisphere world.9 For him this distinction, understandably, had a particular importance; he also pre-eminently understood the way in which the universal is attained to only via the particular; ‘the more we understand individual things, the more we understand God’.10

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But the area in which the hemispheres and philosophy can be mutually illuminating that is of chief interest in this book is that of the relationship of the mind to the world. Just because of the immensity of that topic, I want to limit it by moving on to look at things from the other end of the process, and attempt my second question, what philosophy can tell us that will help us understand the hemisphere differences.

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Let’s return to the main point of hemisphere difference, division versus cohesion. Since the notorious Cartesian subject–object divide, philosophy has grappled with the spectre of solipsism. To know something is to encounter something other, and know it as separate from ourselves. If all I am certain of is my own existence (cogito ergo sum), how does one ever cross the gap? For the solipsist, there is nothing to encounter, since all we know stems from our own mind alone: according to Wittgenstein, the solipsist is like someone who tries to make the car go faster by pushing against the dashboard from inside. There is a paradox here, too: the position is self-undermining, in that it nonetheless demands another mind, another consciousness that can constitute the solipsist (as Hegel’s master needs the slave in order to be a master): to use the term ‘I’ requires the possibility of there being something which is ‘not-I’ – otherwise, in place of ‘all that is, is mine’, we just get the vacuous ‘all that is mine, is mine’.11

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As Louis Sass has demonstrated in relation to the world of the schizophrenic, solipsistic subjectivity on the one hand (with its fantasy of omnipotence) and alienated objectivity on the other (with its related fantasy of impotence) tend to collapse into one another, and are merely facets of the same phenomenon: both imply isolation rather than connection.12 The attempt to adopt a God’s eye view, or ‘view from nowhere’ in Thomas Nagel’s famous phrase, the position pretended by objectivism, is as empty as solipsism, and is ultimately indistinguishable from it in its consequences: the ‘view from nowhere’ pretends to equate to a ‘view from everywhere’.13 What is different is the ‘view from somewhere’. Everything that we know can be known only from an individual point of view, or under one or another aspect of its existence, never in totality or perfection.14 Equally what we come to know consists not of things, but of relationships, each apparently separate entity qualifying the others to which it is related. But this does not entail that there can be no reliably constituted shared world of experience. Because we do not experience precisely the same world does not mean that we are condemned not to meet in a world at all. We cannot take refuge in fantasies of either omnipotence or impotence. The difficult truth is less grand: that there is a something apart from ourselves, which we can influence to some degree. And the evidence is that how we do so matters.

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DEWEY AND JAMES: CONTEXT AND THE NATURE OF TRUTH

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Towards the end of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century the American pragmatist philosophers John Dewey and William James, in different ways, began to signal dissatisfaction with the atomistic, rationalistic approach in philosophy and the abstraction that necessarily goes with it. Dewey wrote:

Thinking is always thinking, but philosophical thinking is, upon the whole, at the extreme end of the scale of distance from the active urgency of concrete situations. It is because of this fact that neglect of context is the besetting fallacy of philosophical thought … I should venture to assert that the most pervasive fallacy of philosophic thinking goes back to neglect of context … neglect of context is the greatest single disaster which philosophic thinking can incur.15

If the process of philosophy is to understand the world, and in reality things are always embedded in a context of relation with other things that alter them, you are not going to succeed in understanding them if you start by taking them out of context. ‘We are not explicitly aware of the role of context just because our every utterance is so saturated with it that it forms the significance of what we say and hear.’16 Here Dewey refers to the implicit nature of the right hemisphere’s world, its insistence on the importance of context and the ultimate importance of right-hemisphere pragmatics in yielding the meaning of ‘what we say and hear’. And context implies change and process:

To see the organism in nature, the nervous system in the organism, the brain in the nervous system, the cortex in the brain is the answer to the problems which haunt philosophy. And when thus seen they will be seen to be in, not as marbles are in a box but as events are in history, in a moving, growing, never finished process.17

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Dewey and James addressed the problem of how one can know truth in a world where things vary depending on context, and part of that context is the nature of the mind that does the knowing. ‘The qualities never were “in” the organism; they always were qualities of interactions in which both extra-organic things and organisms partake.’18 James, like Dewey, saw that there was a something other than ourselves, and that therefore, despite the impossibility of a ‘detached’ objectivity, truth to it was important:

The much lauded objective evidence is never triumphantly there; it is a mere aspiration or Grenzbegriff [limit or ideal notion] marking the infinitely remote ideal of our thinking life … [But] when as empiricists we give up the doctrine of objective certitude, we do not thereby give up the quest or hope of truth itself. We still pin our faith on its existence, and still believe that we gain an ever better position towards it by systematically continuing to roll up experiences and think. Our great difference from the scholastic lies in the way we face. The strength of his system lies in the principles, the origin, the terminus a quo of his thought; for us the strength is in the outcome, the upshot, the terminus ad quem. Not where it comes from but what it leads to is to decide.19

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This account of James’s illuminates the difference between two approaches to knowledge or understanding, those of the two hemispheres. According to the left hemisphere, understanding is built up from the parts; one starts from one certainty, places another next to it, and advances as if building a wall, from the bottom up. It conceives that there is objective evidence of truth for a part outside the context of the whole it goes to constitute. According to the right hemisphere, understanding is derived from the whole, since it is only in the light of the whole that one can truly understand the nature of the parts. One process is pushed from behind (from a terminus a quo), the other pulled from in front (towards a terminus ad quem). According to the latter vision, that of the right hemisphere, truth is only ever provisional, but that does not mean that one must ‘give up the quest or hope of truth itself’.

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Dewey was also dissatisfied with the idea that knowledge was a passive process, whereby clear and certain truths were ‘out there’ to be accessed by a process in which the human mind and imagination did not have to play an active part. His Gifford lectures of 1929, The Quest for Certainty, ‘claimed that the debate in philosophy had rested, ever since the 1630s [Descartes’s era] on too passive a view of the human mind, and on inappropriate demands for geometrical certainty’.20 He deplored the resultant ‘spectator’ theory of knowledge, ‘the traditional conception, according to which the thing to be known is something which exists prior to and wholly apart from the act of knowing’.21

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This theme was taken up by the German and French philosophers of the phenomenological tradition. It is with them that things took a remarkable, almost unforeseeable, step, and it is to them that I now turn. My point in doing so should not be misunderstood. It is not to assert that these philosophers are ‘right’ – though I believe they do reveal important truths about ourselves and the world, known to other traditions, that were until recently completely lost sight of in Western philosophy. There are always different views in philosophy, and argument literally knows no end. There will always be some who remain unconvinced of what these philosophers seem to have seen and tried to convey. No – my point is that these philosophers, none of whom could possibly have had access to what we now know about hemisphere differences, nonetheless each found himself compelled, unawares, to derive the reality and ultimate importance of the right-hemisphere world, even though each started from the premises and tools of philosophy, with their naturally inbuilt bias towards the way of thinking of the left hemisphere.

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HUSSERL AND THE IDEA OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY

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Edmund Husserl was born in Moravia in 1859, and began by studying mathematics, physics and astronomy, though he became increasingly concerned with the relationship between psychology and philosophy. His main works were published between the turn of the twentieth century and the Second World War (he died in 1938); as with Wittgenstein, his philosophical position evolved dramatically, and his later works grapple with the problems of rationalism in a world partly constituted by human consciousness. He was the first, and perhaps the only, true phenomenologist in the strictest sense, aiming to study consciousness and conscious experience (phenomena) objectively, but nonetheless from a first-person, rather than a third-person, perspective. He used particular kinds of thought experiments, called ‘reductions’ (nothing whatever to do with reductionism), in a painstaking attempt to get at things as they are in themselves, aiming to transcend all preconceived theoretical frameworks, and the subject–object divide. Since phenomenology has been the major influence on European philosophy in the twentieth century, Husserl, as its founder, is generally seen as one of the most influential thinkers of our age. Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Scheler and many others are often called phenomenologists, and Hegel, a century earlier, has been seen as a forerunner.

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Though Husserl brought a background in Cartesian philosophy and the methodology of science to bear on mental phenomena, he came to realize that this philosophy and this methodology failed to account for the nature of experience. According to Husserl, the roots of the European crisis of modernism lay in ‘verirrenden Rationalismus’ and ‘Blindheit für das Transzendentale’:22 a sort of mad rationalism and a blindness to the transcendental. In his later philosophy, Husserl aimed to transcend the apparent duality of subjective and objective, of realism and idealism, that had so troubled philosophy since Plato: he emphasised the role that empathy, the capacity not just to put oneself in someone else’s shoes but, importantly, to feel what they are feeling, plays in constructing the world.23 He came to the conclusion that there was an objective reality, but that it was constituted by what he called intersubjectivity. This comes about through shared experience, which is made possible for us by our embodied existence alongside other embodied individuals.24 He distinguished between the two ways in which we know the body: as a material object (Körper), alongside other objects in the world, and in that sense alien to us, and the way we experience it as something not just living, but lived (Leib), as it were from the inside. When we see others engaged in action in the world, we feel them to be leibhaft, as though we shared with them our consciousness of embodied existence.25

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22. Husserl, 1970, p. 290 (1962, p. 337), quoted in Levin, 1999, p. 61. Sass’s thesis that modernism has many of the features of schizophrenia (discussed below, p. 393 ff.) makes an interesting parallel, since he demonstrates that a key element in schizophrenia is not irrationality, but an excessive and misplaced rationalism.

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24. What he called ‘intersubjective phenomenology’ in the fifth Cartesian Meditation (Husserl, 1995).

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25. Husserl, 1952.

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In this emphasis on the body, the importance of empathy, and intersubjectivity (which forms part of what I mean by ‘betweenness’), Husserl is asserting the essential role that the right hemisphere plays in constituting the world in which we live. He, too, emphasises the importance of context: things only are what they are because they find themselves in the surroundings in which they find themselves, and are connected to whatever it is that they are connected to. This raises the spectre of epistemological circularity, since achieving an understanding of any one thing depends on an understanding of the whole; and the tools of language and logical analysis take one away from context, back to the set of familiar concepts that, if one is a philosopher, one is constantly trying to transcend through analysis in language. That was the purpose of what he called the phenomenological reductions. His own approach is linear, but is forced to acknowledge the awkward truth displayed in Escher’s hands. The world arises from a circular process that circles and searches its origins, more like a picture that comes into focus all at once, than a linear address to a target: by a right-hemisphere process, in other words, rather than a left.

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The fact that empathy with others grounds our experience not just of them, but of ourselves and the world, has been borne out by research in psychology in recent years. One might think, in Cartesian fashion, that we attribute an ‘inwardness’ to others on the basis that we recognise our own feelings first, link them to outward expressions, utterances and actions that we make contemporaneously with those feelings, and then, when we see those same expressions in others, attribute the same feelings to them by a sort of logical analogy with ourselves. But developmental psychology shows that this is a false assumption. The direction in which it works appears not to be from within our (separate) selves to within (separate) others, but from shared experience to the development of our own inwardness and that of others. We do not need to learn to make the link between our selves and others, because although individual we are not initially separated, but intersubjective in our consciousness.26 As one philosopher of mind, reflecting on the relevance of phenomenology to neuroscience, has put it,

there is a remarkable convergence between these two traditions, not simply on the topic of intersubjectivity, but on virtually every area of research within cognitive science, as a growing number of scientists and philosophers have discussed. In the case of intersubjectivity, much of the convergence centres on the realization that one’s consciousness of oneself as an embodied individual in the world is founded on empathy – on one’s empathic cognition of others, and others’ empathic cognition of oneself.27

Again the process is circular (or spiral-like), rather than linear.

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27. Evan Thompson (2001, p. 2: emphasis in original). Here he refers specifically to Francisco Varela and Shaun Gallagher: Varela, 1996; Gallagher, 1997; Petitot, Varela, Pachoud et al., 1999.

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The left hemisphere is not impressed by empathy: its concern is with maximising gain for itself, and its driving value is utility. As a result, philosophers in the Anglo-American tradition, more or less untouched by the European phenomenologists, have been nonplussed by altruistic behaviour. They have had to resort to complex logical formulations that defy common sense and experience to explain behaviour that is obviously the product of care as being ultimately selfish (despite the fact that the Prisoner’s Dilemma – see below – appears to demonstrate that the rational person should not in fact act selfishly, another paradox that illuminates one of the ‘Gödelian’ points within the left hemisphere’s system). Naturally there are ways of logically taking into account such problems of logic. More and more refined riders, more self-referential loops, are added, reminding one of nothing so much as the epicycles upon epicycles that were added by pre-Keplerian astronomers to planetary orbits in order to ‘save the phenomena’. It is like the attempt to describe a living curve using only straight lines: more and more are added, and the curve is ever more approximated, with infinite complexity, the lines never quite reaching their target and always remaining outside the curve – which a free hand could have delineated in one sweep. Or like a complex construction of cogs and wheels to produce a simulacrum of a living person, there being always, however closely, even exquisitely, approaching its goal, something more that it lacks.

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The Prisoner’s Dilemma is a problem that will be familiar to many readers, originating in an aspect of economic and social modelling known as games theory, and first posed by Flood and Dresher in 1950.28 It goes like this. The police suspect two individuals, A and B, of a serious crime, but have insufficient evidence to pin it on them. They arrest the suspects and interrogate them separately. Each is told that if he testifies for the prosecution against the other, and the other remains silent, he will go free and his opposite number will receive the maximum sentence of 10 years in jail. In the case where they both remain silent, the police would be able to make only a much lesser charge stick, for which they would each serve six months. If each were to betray the other, each would receive a two-year sentence. Neither prisoner is in a position to know what the other prisoner will do. How should each respond – by remaining silent or betraying the other (defecting)?

Their options are summarised below.

 B is silent  

 B defects  

 A is silent   

 A gets six months   

 A gets 10 years   

 B gets six months   

 B goes free   

 A defects   

 A goes freeA gets 2 years   

 B gets 10 years   

 B gets 2 years   

The essence of the problem is that the best outcome for both is where each remains silent, and they each serve six months (top left option). But, if each behaves rationally, they will end up doing worse: each will defect, and they will both end up serving two years (bottom right option). The reason for this is clear. A does not know what B will do, so he weighs up his options. If B is silent, A will do better by defecting: he will go free, instead of serving six months in jail. If, on the other hand, B defects, A will still do better by defecting, since he will get two years instead of 10. So whatever happens he is better off to defect. And, of course, the situation being symmetrical, B will reason similarly: hence they are stuck in the bottom right hand corner of the diagram, while they would both be better off in the top left.

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As the game is repeated, various attempts to anticipate what the other may be thinking can be made, affecting the outcome. For example, A may learn from experience that neither can emerge from this trap unless they are prepared to trust and take a risk. So he may behave altruistically in the next round. If B does also, they will both be rewarded. If B does not, A may decide not to be a sucker in the third round, but instead to punish A by defecting next time. Even if B does reciprocate in round two, A may decide to defect in round three, on the expectation that B may carry on reciprocating, to A’s advantage. Obviously there are an infinite number of such tangles that can be worked through, but they are worked through only in such artificial settings by computer scientists and philosophers. In the real world we realize that, in a nutshell, we cannot get anywhere unless we are prepared to take a risk and we are prepared to trust. Calculation is unhelpful, and is superseded by a habit of beneficence in most of us for whom the right orbitofrontal cortex, the basis of empathy, is still functioning properly. For highly unempathic individuals, such as psychopaths, in whom this part of the brain is defective, and therefore for whom this aspect of the world is missing, they will devote themselves, like philosophers, to calculation.29

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Most subjects in the Prisoner’s Dilemma prefer mutual co-operation over unilateral defection, even though the dilemma is set up so that it is apparently in their self-interest to defect, regardless of what the other player does.30 It seems we do not seek simply to maximise our material advantage at the expense of others, and this is not explained by ‘selfish’ prudential reasoning. Altruism is a necessary consequence of empathy: we feel others’ feeling, engage in their being. The great apes are capable of empathy and can be altruistic: for example Binti Jua, a gorilla at Brookfield Zoo in Chicago, saved a young boy who fell into her compound.31 Dogs that have lived with humans can act in ways that are driven neither by instinct nor by any conceivable self-interest, and would be counted altruistic if they occurred in humans: they cannot be making a calculation of any kind. Why should we not also be capable of acts of love?

We should remember that in mammals the social bonding mechanisms are based on learning and are certainly more pervasive than the innate mechanisms for ‘kin recognition’. We can learn to love other animals … the acquisition of nurturant behaviour leaves a seemingly indelible print on a creature’s way of being in the world.32

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32. Panksepp, 1998, p. 258.

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Altruism in humans extends far beyond anything in the animal world, and also beyond what is called ‘reciprocal altruism’, in which we behave ‘altruistically’ in calculated expectation of the favour being reciprocated. It is not a matter of the genes looking after themselves at the expense of the individual, either; human beings co-operate with people with whom they are not genetically related. It is also far more than merely co-operation based on the importance of maintaining one’s reputation; we co-operate with, and put ourselves out to help, those we may barely know, those we know we may never meet again, and those who can in no way reward us. The possibility of future reciprocation may, of course, influence decisions, where it operates, but it is not fundamental to the phenomenon.33

It is mutuality, not reciprocity, fellow-feeling, not calculation, which is both the motive and the reward for successful co-operation. And the outcome, in utilitarian terms, is not the important point: it is the process, the relationship, that matters. At the neurological level, we know that in experimental situations using the Prisoner’s Dilemma, subjects that achieve mutual co-operation with another human individual show activity in areas of the brain associated with pleasure (parts of the mesolimbic dopamine system, including the striatum and the orbitofrontal cortex); they do not, however, in a situation where they achieve the appearances of ‘mutual co-operation’ with a programmed computer rather than a living person. It is also interesting that when playing with a human partner the majority of the regions showing particular involvement in co-operation are right-sided, whereas with a machine partner they are mainly left-sided (stuff the empathy, we’re just both out to win).34 And in case anyone should think that empathy necessarily means being soft on others, those right-sided regions include the right caudate, an area known to be involved in altruistic punishment of defection.35

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35. See n. 34 above. An example of altruistic punishment is the schoolteacher staying behind after school to supervise detention because he or she believes that punishment in this case is good for society, even at cost to the punisher.

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34. Rilling, Gutman, Zeh et al., 2002; de Quervain, Fischbacher, Treyer et al., 2004.

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MERLEAU-PONTY: EMPATHY AND THE BODY

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The discussion of empathy obliges me to step out of chronological sequence here, to look at the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, since the part played by empathy and the body in the construction of reality is central to his thinking. He was born in 1908, and his major works were published in French between the war years and the 1960s, with translations into English following by ten to twenty years in most cases: it would be hard to overstate his influence on philosophy, psychology and art criticism from the second half of the twentieth century onwards. He was among the many thinkers that were influenced by Husserl’s philosophy of intersubjectivity.

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Merleau-Ponty wrote about the reciprocity of communication that ‘it is as if the other person’s intentions inhabited my body and mine his’.36 The concept of what may be called the ‘lived body’, the sense of the body not as something we live inside, not even as an extension of ourselves, but as an aspect of our existence which is fundamental to our being, could be seen as the ultimate foundation of the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. He recapitulated the view of Henri Bergson that the self-experience of the human being is embedded in the world, with the body as the mediator, and held that the human body is the means whereby consciousness and the world are profoundly interrelated and engaged with one another. For Merleau-Ponty the ‘object’ of perception cannot be viewed in isolation, because it is in reality embedded in a context, the nexus of relations among existing things which gives it meaning within the world. Thus no one object exists independently of others, but reflects a part of whatever else it co-exists with, and in turn is itself similarly reflected there. This is related to a sense of the intrinsic incompleteness of perspective available on any given entity at a given moment. Such partial disclosures, ‘takes’ or Abschattungen (a term of Husserl’s, often, rather unhelpfully, translated as ‘adumbrations’), are a necessary part of the true experience of any existing thing, which ultimately exists in the totality of possible views. Such partial views do not undermine, but tend to confirm, such a thing’s real existence: only the representation of a theoretical ideal could pretend to completeness. Merleau-Ponty emphasised specifically the importance of depth as a foundation for such experience in the lived world, contrasting the different aspects, or Abschattungen, of a single whole, which reveal themselves in an object that has depth, with the parts that are all that one is left with where the object lacks depth.37

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36. Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 185.

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37. Merleau-Ponty, 1969, as discussed by Murata, 1998, p. 57: ‘Only something that appears in depth can have “aspects” in the true sense, because without depth there can be no “aspects” nor “sides,” but only parts.’

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That the relations between ‘the subject and his body’, and in turn between the body and the world, the relations which form the focus of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical concerns, are underwritten by the right hemisphere is knowledge potentially available to anyone who has cared for stroke patients. It becomes obvious when something goes wrong with right-hemisphere functioning. This was remarked nearly 50 years ago in a now classic paper on the apraxias, neurological syndromes in which there is an inability to carry out an action, despite there being no impairment of sensory or motor function. Of these conditions Hécaen and his colleagues wrote: ‘It is indeed remarkable that the apraxias expressing an impairment of relations between the subject and his body or between the body and the surrounding space are found in connection with lesions of the minor [i.e. right] hemisphere.’38 All the same, when the issue is how to use an object, at least if the use is straightforward, the lesion is usually in the left hemisphere; but where it is not a question of straightforward use, the right hemisphere tends to be implicated.39 Constructional apraxias, which depend on the loss of the sense of the whole, are commonest and most severe after right-sided lesions.40

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38. Hécaen, de Ajuriaguerra & Angelergues, 1963, p. 227.

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39. Haaland & Flaherty, 1984.

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40. Sunderland, Tinson & Bradley, 1994; Benton, 1967; Benton & Fogel, 1962; Black & Bernard, 1984; Black & Strub, 1976; Mack & Levine, 1981; Piercy, Hécaen & de Ajuriaguerra, 1960; Piercy & Smyth, 1962; Villa, Gainotti & De Bonis, 1986.

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For Merleau-Ponty truth is arrived at through engagement with the world, not through greater abstraction from it; the general is encountered through, rather than in spite of, the particular; and the infinite through, rather than in spite of, the finite. In relation to art, Merleau-Ponty’s view, which accords with experience, was that the artist did not merely reflect what was there anyway, albeit in a novel way, but actually ‘brought into being a truth’ about the world that was not there before, perhaps the best example of the universal being manifest through the particular.41

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41. Matthews, 2002, p. 136.

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It is the rootedness of our thought and language in the body that we share with others which means that despite the fact that all truth is relative, this in no way undermines the possibility of shared truth. It is the right hemisphere’s ‘primary consciousness’, coupled to the body’s preconscious awareness of the world, which relates our visceral and emotional experience to what we know about the world.42 This position has been corroborated more recently by Lakoff and Johnson, and once again the body is the crucial mediator:

The mind is not merely embodied, but embodied in such a way that our conceptual systems draw largely upon the commonalities of our bodies and of the environments we live in. The result is that much of a person’s conceptual system is either universal or widespread across languages and cultures. Our conceptual systems are not totally relative and not merely a matter of historical contingency, even though a degree of conceptual relativity does exist and even though historical contingency does matter a great deal … truth is mediated by embodied understanding and imagination. That does not mean that truth is purely subjective or that there is no stable truth. Rather, our common embodiment allows for common, stable truths.43

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42. Edelman, 1989.

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43. Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, p. 6.

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The grounding role in experience played by empathy, the primacy for Merleau-Ponty of experience over conceptual thought (one of his essays is entitled ‘The primacy of perception, and its philosophical consequences’),44 his insistence on context and on the fundamental role played by the physically instantiated self in the ‘lived body’ as the prerequisite for being-in-the-world, the lived body as the medium of intersubjective experience, the consequent importance of depth, which is the necessary condition for embodied existence, his emphasis on the work of art as bringing into being something entirely new, not just a redeployment of what already exists, are all, in my view, expressions of the stance or disposition towards the world of the right hemisphere.

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HEIDEGGER AND THE NATURE OF BEING

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However, it was with the philosophy of Martin Heidegger that this world view reached its most comprehensive ever expression.45 Here we need to step back a few years. Born in 1889 in southern Germany, he was destined for the priesthood, and his early work was on Aristotle and Duns Scotus; but he began to realise that our treatment of being, as though it were just an attribute of things like other attributes, or, worse, a thing alongside other things, led to a misunderstanding of the world and our selves. His great work Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) was published in 1927, and its importance was immediately recognised.

311

Because our use of a term such as ‘being’ makes us feel that we understand what being is, it hides the sense of radical astonishment we would have if we could truly understand it, and subverts our attempts to do so. I am reminded of Cantor’s perception that treating infinity as just another kind of number stopped us understanding its nature and hence the nature of the world. But just as that did not mean that we should abandon mathematics, Heidegger’s insight does not mean that we should abandon language. It just means that we have to be constantly vigilant to undermine language’s attempt to undermine our understanding.

312

While Heidegger has ardent admirers and equally ardent detractors, there is no doubting his importance, despite the difficulty of his writings, in every aspect of modern thought: his influence throughout the humanities has been profound indeed. Heidegger’s entire thrust is away from the clear light of analysis, and this has led to misunderstandings. While he has been admired as a wise philosopher-teacher by some, he has been reviled as an obfuscator by others. Those with an interest in tearing down the boundaries of the world of ordinary sense have adopted him as a patron. I believe this attempt by what Julian Young calls ‘the “anarcho-existentialists” for whom every reality interpretation is an oppressive power-structure’ to annex Heidegger to their cause represents a travesty, an almost total inversion of what he stood for.46 For Heidegger, the fact that our apprehension of whatever is takes part in the process of that thing becoming what it is, and that therefore there is no single truth about anything that exists, does not mean that any version of a thing is valid or that all versions are equally valid. As Eric Matthews says, talking about Merleau-Ponty’s reflections on the art work:

Because the medium of the resulting work is not conventionally-referring language, whatever meaning it has will not be expressible in any other terms than those of the work itself. It is not an arbitrary meaning: because we cannot give a ‘correct’ translation into some other medium, it does not follow that we can give the work any meaning we care to.47

And that does not go just for works of art. Things are not whatever we care to make them. There is a something that exists apart from our own minds, and our attempt to apprehend whatever it is needs to be true to, faithful to, that whatever-it-is-that-exists and at the same time true to ourselves in making that apprehension. No single truth does not mean no truth.

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47. Matthews, 2002, p. 139.

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To speak of truth sounds too grand, too filled with the promise of certainty, and we are rightly suspicious of it. But truth will not go away that easily. The statement that ‘there is no such thing as truth’ is itself a truth statement, and implies that it is truer than its opposite, the statement that ‘truth exists’. If we had no concept of truth, we could not state anything at all, and it would even be pointless to act. There would be no purpose, for example, in seeking the advice of doctors, since there would be no point in having their opinion, and no basis for their view that one treatment was better than another. None of us actually lives as though there were no truth. Our problem is more with the notion of a single, unchanging truth.

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The word ‘true’ suggests a relationship between things: being true to someone or something, truth as loyalty, or something that fits, as two surfaces may be said to be ‘true’. It is related to ‘trust’, and is fundamentally a matter of what one believes to be the case. The Latin word verum (true) is cognate with a Sanskrit word meaning to choose or believe: the option one chooses, the situation in which one places one’s trust. Such a situation is not an absolute – it tells us not only about the chosen thing, but also about the chooser. It cannot be certain: it involves an act of faith, and it involves being faithful to one’s intuitions.

314

For Heidegger, Being (Sein) is hidden, and things as they truly are (das Seiende) can be ‘unconcealed’ only by a certain disposition of patient attention towards the world – emphatically not by annexing it, exploiting it or ransacking it for congenial meanings, in a spirit of ‘anything goes’. Heidegger related truth to the Greek concept of aletheia, literally ‘unconcealing’. In this concept a number of facets of truth are themselves unconcealed. In the first place it suggests something that pre-exists our attempts to ‘dis-cover’ it.48 Then it is an entity defined by a negative – by what it is not; and in opposition to something else (unconcealing). It is come at by a process, a coming into being of something; and that process is also, importantly, part of the truth. It is an act, a journey, not a thing. It has degrees. It is found by removing things, rather than by putting things together. This idea of truth-as-unconcealing contrasts with the idea of truth-as-correctness, which is static, unchanging. Truth as unconcealing is a progress towards something – the something is in sight, but never fully seen; whereas truth as correctness is given as a thing in itself, that can in principle be fully known.

315

For Heidegger, truth was such an unconcealing, but it was also a concealing, since opening one horizon inevitably involves the closing of others. There is no single privileged viewpoint from which every aspect can be seen.49 It may be true that, to quote Patricia Churchland, ‘it is reasonable to identify the blueness of an object with its disposition to scatter … electromagnetic waves preferentially at about 0.46µm’ [emphasis in the original].50 That is, I suppose, a sort of truth about the colour blue. That is one way in which blue discloses itself. Most of us would think it left rather a lot out. There are also other very important truths about the colour blue that we experience, for example, when we see a canvas by Ingres, or by Yves Klein, or view the sky, or sea, which are closed off by this. It is, in this sense, like the duck–rabbit: we can have only one ‘take’ on it at a time. We see things by seeing them as something. In this sense too we create the world by attending to it in a particular way.

315

But there is a more important reason why truth has to be concealment. Every thing that purports to be the truth is, according to Heidegger, inevitably an approximation and true things, things that really are, rather than as we may apprehend them, are in themselves ineffable, ungraspable. Thus to see them clearly is to see something at best indistinct to vision – except that to see them distinctly would not be truly to see them. To have the impression that one sees things as they truly are, is not to permit them to ‘presence’ to us, but to substitute something else for them, something comfortable, familiar and graspable – what I would call a left-hemisphere re-presentation. The inexperienced mariner sees the ice floe; the experienced mariner sees the berg and is awe-struck.

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Heidegger’s concept of hiddenness does not imply a sort of throwing up of one’s hands in the air before the incomprehensible. Just the opposite, as his life’s work implies. Hiddenness does not mean, in the arts, being beyond approach, nor does it invite a free-for-all; instead it suggests that what is understood by the right hemisphere is likely to be uncomprehended by the left. Heidegger’s somewhat gnomic saying, in der Unverborgenheit waltet die Verbergung (‘in unconcealment dwells hiddenness and safekeeping’) appositely draws attention to the simultaneous hiddenness and radiance of truth in works of art. The meaning is present wholly in the work of art: it cannot be extracted from it or dragged into the daylight, but is perfectly projected there where it is. One might compare Wittgenstein: ‘The work of art does not aim to convey something else, just itself.’51

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The stance, or disposition, that we need to adopt, according to Heidegger, is one of ‘waiting on’ (nachdenken) something, rather than just ‘waiting for’ it; a patient, respectful nurturing of something into disclosure, in which we need already to have some idea of what it is that will be. George Steiner compares it to ‘that “bending toward” of spirit and intellect and ear’ to be seen in Fra Angelico’s Annunciation in San Marco.52 A highly active passivity, in other words. There is a process of responsiveness between man (Dasein, literally ‘being there’, or perhaps ‘the being that is in the world’) and Being, which is well described again by Steiner:

An Ent-sprechen is not ‘an answer to’ (une réponse à), but a ‘response to’, a ‘correspondence with’, a dynamic reciprocity and matching such as occur when gears, both in quick motion, mesh. Thus, our question as to the nature of philosophy calls not for an answer in the sense of a textbook definition or formulation, be it Platonic, Cartesian, or Lockeian, but for an Ent-sprechung, a response, a vital echo, a ‘re-sponsion’ in the liturgical sense of participatory engagement … For Descartes, truth is determined and validated by certainty. Certainty, in turn, is located in the ego. The self becomes the hub of reality and relates to the world outside itself in an exploratory, necessarily exploitative, way. As knower and user, the ego is predator. For Heidegger, on the contrary, the human person and self-consciousness are not the centre, the assessors of existence. Man is only a privileged listener and respondent to existence. The vital relation to otherness is not, as for Cartesian and positivist rationalism, one of ‘grasping’ and pragmatic use. It is a relation of audition. We are trying ‘to listen to the voice of Being’. It is, or ought to be, a relation of extreme responsibility, custodianship, answerability to and for.53

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52. Steiner, 1978, p. 130.

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53. ibid., pp. 29–31.

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The contrast here being drawn between, on the one hand, the isolated ego, standing in a relation of alienated and predatory exploitation to the world around it, mysteriously leaping from subject to object and back again, retiring with its booty into the cabinet of its consciousness, where it demands certainty of knowledge; and, on the other, a self that is drawn into and inextricably bound up with the world in a relation, not just metaphysical in nature, but of ‘being-with’ and inside, a relation of care (Sorge) and concern, suggesting involvement of the whole experiential being, not just the processes of cognition – this contrast evokes in my view some of the essential differences between the worlds that are brought about for us by the two hemispheres. But that is by no means all.

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Since Dasein is ‘to be there’ in the world – the literal, actual, concrete, daily world – to be human at all is to be immersed in the earth, and the quotidian matter-of-factness of the world. The right hemisphere is concerned with the familiar, not in the sense of the inauthentically routine, but in the sense of the things that form part of ‘my’ daily world or familia, the household, those I care for.54 It is not alien from material things, but, quite the opposite, attends to individual things in all their concrete particularity. This is exactly the ‘personal sensibility to the grain and substance of physical existence, to the “thingness” and obstinate quiddity of things, be they rock or tree or human presence’ that is found in Heidegger.55 Again this roots existence in the body and in the senses. We do not inhabit the body like some alien Cartesian piece of machine wizardry, but live it – a distinction between the left and right hemisphere understandings of the body. In trying to convey the ‘otherness’ of a particular building, its sheer existence or essent prior to any one act of cognition by which it is partially apprehended, Heidegger speaks of the primal fact of its existence being made present to us in the very smell of it, more immediately communicated in this way than by any description or inspection.56 The senses are crucial to the ‘presence’ of being, ‘to our apprehension of an is in things that no analytic dissection or verbal account can isolate’.57

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54. van Lancker, 1991.

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55. Steiner, 1978, p. 34.

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56. Heidegger, 1959, p. 33.

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57. Steiner, 1978, p. 41.

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Time is responsible for Dasein’s individuality, and is the condition under which existing things are. In Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) Heidegger insists that we do not live in time, as if it were some independent, abstract flow, alien to our being, but live time – much as being-in-the-world is not the same as being in the world like a marble in a box. We live time rather than just conceive it, and similarly we live the body rather than simply derive sensory information through it.58 Through the experience of time, Dasein becomes a ‘being towards death’: without death existence would be care-less, would lack the power that draws us to one another and to the world. For Heidegger the ‘nadir of inauthentic temporality’ is time as a sequence of instants (the left-hemisphere mode), which is opposed to the lived time of Dasein, and whatever gives it meaning.59

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58. See, e.g., Heidegger, 1999, pp. 458–72.

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59. See, e.g., ibid., p. 420 ff: and Inwood, 1999, p. 221.

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Everydayness was an important concept for Heidegger: again it has two meanings, and Heidegger’s distinctions once more illuminate hemisphere differences, as hemisphere differences illuminate Heidegger’s meaning. To take a famous example of his, the hammer that I use finds its place naturally in a context of the action for which I use it, and becomes almost an extension of myself, so that there is no awareness or focal (left hemisphere) attention to it. It recedes into its context – the lived world of me, my arm, the action of hammering, and the world around in which this takes place (right hemisphere); in Heidegger’s terms it is zuhanden (‘ready-to-hand’).60 By contrast, it stands out, becomes in Heidegger’s terms vorhanden (‘present-at-hand’), only when something goes wrong and interrupts this flow, and draws my attention to it as an object for inspection (left hemisphere). Then it begins to become alien. But the situation is more complex and alive (right hemisphere) than this analytical schema (left hemisphere) makes it appear. Things do not end up ‘filed’ (left hemisphere) or for that matter ‘dwelling’ (right hemisphere) in one or other hemisphere, but are constantly moving back and forth, or, to put it more accurately, aspects of them belong to one hemisphere and aspects to the other, and these aspects are continually coming forward and retreating in a process that is dynamic. The business of living calls forth aspects of things in either hemisphere. The routine of daily life, in which things have their familiar place and order (right hemisphere), can dull things into what Heidegger called inauthenticity (left hemisphere), through the very weight of familiarity, and in my terms its left hemisphere re-presentation comes to take the place of the thing itself (broadly the idea of the hammer replaces the thing as it is experienced). However, the very alienation inherent in the experience of its sudden Vorhandenheit, when the hammer becomes the focus of my attention, allows the possibility of rediscovering the authenticity that had been lost, because the detachment enables us to see it anew as an existing thing, something remarkable, almost with a sense of wonder (in which, for Heidegger, as for many other philosophers, all philosophy begins).

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60. See, e.g., Heidegger, 1999, pp. 98–107.

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As things become dulled and inauthentic, they become conceptualised rather than experienced; they are taken out of their living context, a bit like ripping the heart out of a living body. Heidegger called this process that of Gestell, or framing, a term which suggests the detachment of seeing things as if through a window (as in a famous image of Descartes’s),61 or as re-presented in a picture, or, nowadays, framed by the TV or computer screen.62 Inherent in it is the notion of an arbitrarily abrupted set of potential relationships, with the context – which ultimately means the totality of Being, all that is – neatly severed at the edges of the frame. Because reality is infinitely ramified and interconnected, because its nature is to hide, and to recede from the approach of logical analysis, language is a constantly limiting, potentially misdirecting and distorting medium. Yet it is necessary to Heidegger as a philosopher. In its tendency to linearity it resists the reticulated web of Heidegger’s thought, and his writing espouses images and metaphors of paths that are circuitous and indirect, the Holzwege, Feldweg, Wegmarken, and so on, suggesting threading one’s way through woods and fields.63 It is interesting that Descartes’s philosophy was half-baked while he slept in a Bavarian oven, the metaphor of stasis and self-enclosure revealing, philosophy and the body being one, the nature of the philosophy; whereas Heidegger was, according to Steiner, ‘an indefatigable walker in unlit places’: solvitur ambulando.64 Truth is process, not object.

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61. See p. 181.

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62. Heidegger, 1977, pp. 3–35.

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From the analytic point of view, as Steiner says, one has constantly to attempt to ‘jump “outside” and beyond the speaker’s own shadow’.65 One must never also lose sight of the interconnected nature of things, so that Heidegger’s project is in this, too, opposed to Descartes, who limited himself to viewing objects singly: ‘if one tries to look at many objects at one glance, one sees none of them distinctly’.66 Heidegger reached naturally towards metaphor, in which more than one thing is kept implicitly (hiddenly) before the mind, since he valued, unusually for a philosopher, the ambiguity of poetic language. He lamented the awful Eindeutigkeit – literally the ‘one-meaningness’, or explicitness – to which in a computer age we tend: both Wittgenstein and Heidegger, according to Richard Rorty, ‘ended by trying to work out honourable terms on which philosophy might surrender to poetry’.67 Wittgenstein’s work became increasingly apophthegmatic: he repeatedly struggled with the idea that philosophy was not possible outside of poetry.68 And Heidegger ultimately found himself, in his last works, resorting to poetry to convey the complexity and depth of his meaning. He saw language as integral to whatever it brings forward, just as the body is to Dasein, not as a mere container for thought: ‘Words and language are not wrappings in which things are packed for the commerce of those who write and speak.’69

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66. Descartes, 1984–91d, ‘Rule IX’, p. 33. Descartes’s spirit is in total opposition to that of Goethe, who warned that ’zur Einsicht in den geringsten Teil ist die Übersicht des Ganzen nötig’ (‘to have insight into the smallest detail one must have an overview of the whole’): Goethe, 1989, ‘Betrachtungen über Farbenlehre und Farbenbehandlung der Alten’, p. 552 (trans. I. McG.).

1025

65. Steiner, 1978, p. 12.

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67. Rorty, 1989, p. 26.

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69. Heidegger, 1959, pp. 13–14.

323

There is also inherent in Heidegger’s talk of language an understanding that our relationship with language, like the relationship we have with the world which it images, is not a matter of will, bending words like things to our utility, not one of manipulation and direction (as the left hemisphere has it). It is language that speaks in us, he says, not we who speak it.70 The idea, at first sight paradoxical (once again Heidegger strains to the limit what language can say), incorporates the idea that language connects us to, and in some sense, instantiates, wisdom that we need through painful philosophical discourse, or, as he increasingly came to believe, through poetry, to permit to speak to us; that we need to listen to what emerges from our language, rather than speak through it – which is to impose ideas on it. We need to allow the ‘silent’ right hemisphere to speak, with its understanding that is hard to put into the ordinary language of every day, since everyday language already takes us straight back to the particular way of being in the world – that of the left hemisphere – that it is trying to circumvent. When we go towards something in an effort to apprehend it, Heidegger appears to be saying, we are not näively the prime movers. For us to be able to understand anything we have already to be in possession of enough understanding of it to be able to approach it, and indeed we have, yes, already to understand it in some sense before we can ‘understand’ it.71

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70. Heidegger, 1971, pp. 189–210.

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71. ‘Understanding arises neither through talking at length [vieles Reden] nor through busily hearing something “all around”. Only he who already understands can listen [zuhören].’ Heidegger, 1999, p. 210.

324

We arrive at the position (which is so familiar from experience) that we cannot attain an understanding by grasping it for ourselves. It has already to be in us, and the task is to awaken it, or perhaps to unfold it – to bring it into being within us. Similarly we can never make others understand something unless they already, at some level, understand it.72 We cannot give them our understanding, only awaken their own, latent, understanding. This is also the meaning of the dark saying that ideas come to us, not we to them. Our role in understanding is that of an open, in one sense active, passivity: ‘in insight (Einblick), men are the ones that are caught sight of’.73 The idea is also familiar in Merleau-Ponty: ‘it is being that speaks within us, and not we who speak of being’; and again, ‘it is not we who perceive, it is the thing that perceives itself yonder’.74 The idea that the conscious mind is passive in relation to what comes to it through the right hemisphere, and from whatever-it-is-that-exists beyond, is also expressed by Jung: ‘Everyone knows nowadays that people “have complexes”. What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us.’75

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72. Compare: ’Il y a de certaines choses qu’on n’entend jamais, quand on ne les entend pas d’abord’ (‘Some things are such that if you do not understand them immediately, you never will’), Mme de Sévigné, lettre du 14e mai 1686 au comte de Bussy-Rabutin (Sévigné, 1846, p. 534); and ‘If you have not already got it in you, you cannot receive it’, from the Chuang Tzu, in J. Needham, 1954–98, vol. 2 (1956), p. 85.

1026

73. Heidegger, 1977, p. 47.

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74. Merleau-Ponty, 1968, pp. 194 & 185 respectively; cited by Levin, 1999, p. 208.

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75. C. Jung, 1953–79, vol. 8, p. 200.

325

Philosophy and philosophical discourse is only one way of understanding the world. Most people who instinctively see the world in Heideggerian terms don’t become philosophers – philosophers are self-selected as those who feel they can account for, or at any rate sensibly question, reality in the very terms that would need to be transcended if we are to do justice to the right hemisphere’s reality. There are notable exceptions, however, Schopenhauer being one of them. As Heidegger and Wittgenstein made terms with poetry, Schopenhauer believed that the mediations of art in general, but particularly music, were more directly able to reveal the nature of reality than was philosophy. He also believed in the importance of compassion and religious enlightenment in doing so. Interestingly, from our point of view, he said that ‘philosophical astonishment is therefore at bottom perplexed and melancholy; philosophy, like the overture to Don Juan [Mozart’s Don Giovanni], begins with a minor chord’.76 In view of the associations of melancholy, music, empathy and religious feeling with the right hemisphere, the observation acquires a new significance, because I believe that, despite appearances, philosophy begins and ends in the right hemisphere, though it has to journey through the left hemisphere on its way (see below).

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76. Schopenhauer, 1969, vol. 2, supplements to First Book, Part 2, ch. 17, ‘On man’s need for metaphysics’. The original reads: ‘Das philosophische Erstaunen ist demnach im Grunde ein bestürztes und betrübtes: die Philosophie hebt, wie die Ouvertüre zum Don Juan, mit einem Mollakkord an’ (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, II, Ergänzungen zum Ersten Buch, ii, 17, ‘Über das metaphysische Bedürfniß des Menschen’, 1960, vol. 2, p. 222).

326

It is still true that Heidegger, while doing all he can to use language to undermine language, persists in according a primal role to language in Being. It is often asked, why not music? Perhaps the answer is personal: if he had not thought language of primal importance, and himself instinctively seized on language rather than music or the visual arts, as his medium, he would not have been a philosopher. All the same, starting from the modes of operation of the left hemisphere – language, abstraction, analysis – Heidegger remained true to what he perceived was constantly hidden by the left hemisphere’s view; he did not, for once, let it be swept away, but with extraordinary patience, persistence and subtlety, allowed it to speak for itself, despite the commitment to language, abstraction and analysis, and thus succeeded in transcending them. It is this extraordinary achievement which makes him, in my view, a heroic figure as a philosopher, despite all that might be, and has been, said against the ambivalence of his public role in the Germany of the 1930s.77

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77. For an unbiased account, see J. Young, 1998.

327

Although starting from a very different philosophical tradition, and working by a different route, the later Wittgenstein reached many of the same conclusions as Heidegger. There can be no doubting the scrupulosity of Wittgenstein’s grapplings with the nature of reality. Yet, like Heidegger, he found that the philosophical process needed to work against itself, and saw himself as bringing philosophy to a standstill. ‘If my name survives’, he wrote, ‘then only as the terminus ad quem of the great philosophy of the West. As the name of him who burnt the library of Alexandria.’78 Like Heidegger, Wittgenstein too emphasised the primacy of context over rules and system building, of practice over theory: ‘What one acquires here is not a technique; one learns correct judgments. There are also rules, but they do not form a system, and only experienced people can apply them right. Unlike calculating rules.’79 He emphasised that it is not just minds that think and feel, but human beings. Like Heidegger, he grasped that truth can hide or deceive as well as reveal. Wittgenstein scholar Peter Hacker writes:

Every source of truth is also unavoidably a source of falsehood, from which its own canons of reasoning and confirmation attempt to protect it. But it can also become a source of conceptual confusion, and consequently of forms of intellectual myth-making, against which it is typically powerless. Scientism, the illicit extension of the methods and categories of science beyond their legitimate domain, is one such form, and the conception of the unity of the sciences and the methodological homogeneity of the natural sciences and of humanistic studies one such myth. It is the task of philosophy to defend us against such illusions of reason.80

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78. Wittgenstein, 1997, 2003.

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79. Wittgenstein, 1967b, Part II, xi, p. 227.

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80. Hacker, 2001, p. 73.

328

Wittgenstein was sceptical of the scientific method for two main reasons: its tendency to ‘reduce’, and the deceptive clarity of its models. He referred to the ‘preoccupation with the method of science … reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive natural laws’.81 Though ‘irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does … it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything.’ (Cf. Joseph Needham: ‘nothing can ever be reduced to anything’.82 ) One of his favourite sayings was ‘Everything is what it is and not another thing,’83 an expression of the right hemisphere’s passionate commitment to the sheer quiddity of each individual thing, through which alone we approach the universal, and its resistance to the reductionism inevitable in the system building of the left hemisphere.

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81. Wittgenstein, 1958, p. 18.

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82. From ‘A biologist’s view of Whitehead’s philosophy’ (1941), in J. Needham, 1943, p. 183.

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83. Wittgenstein, 1967a, p. 27. The phrase, however, has a history: it is first recorded in a sermon by Joseph Butler (1729, Preface, p xxix).

328

Despite his respect for the honourable business of the search for clarity, Wittgenstein was wary of the false clarity that scientific thinking, and sometimes the mere business of formulation in language, brings. I referred earlier to the way in which language’s particular contribution to thought is to give it clarity and solidity: as his disciple Friedrich Waismann saw, speaking of the mind’s own processes, a psychological motive ‘thickens, hardens, and takes shape, as it were, only after we express it in words’.84 We need to struggle towards objectivity, and yet the reality we aim to reveal is itself not precise, so that the artificial precision of our language betrays us.85 Wittgenstein spoke disparagingly of the ‘irritation of intellect’, the ‘tickling of intellect’, which he opposed to the religious impulse (he said he could not help ‘seeing every problem from a religious point of view’).86 He saw the business of philosophy as opposing the anaesthetic of self-complacent reason: ‘Man has to awaken to wonder – and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.’87

1027

(Waismann, 1994, p. 136).

1027

84. Waismann, 1994, p. 112. For Waismann I am indebted to Louis Sass (2001).

1027

86. Sass, 2001, p. 284; Drury, 1984, p. 79.

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87. Wittgenstein, 1984, p. 5e.

329

Heidegger would have agreed. The importance of Heidegger for the theme of this book lies not only in his perception that ultimately the world is given by (what we can now see to be) the right hemisphere. He went even further, and appears intuitively to have understood the evolving relationship between the hemispheres, which forms the subject of the second part of this book: namely that, with at times tumultuous upheavals, retrenchments and lurches forward, there has been a nonetheless relentless move towards the erosion of the power of the right hemisphere over recent centuries in the West.

329

Freud himself, although he knew that the rational understanding, which he called ‘secondary process’, could never replace the ‘primary process’ of the unconscious, came to believe that over human history reason had encroached on instinct and intuition.88 Heidegger saw that there was a fatal continuity between the assertive, predicative, definitional, classificatory idiom of Western metaphysics and that will to rational–technological mastery over life which he calls nihilism. In The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, he wrote that ‘the fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture’.89 He saw scientific research as bringing a certain type of narrow and decontextualised methodology to bear on nature and on history, which isolated and objectified its subject and was essential to the character of the enterprise. Speaking of vision, and the evolution of the Greek concept of theoria, later the Latin contemplatio, he sees ‘the impulse, already prepared in Greek thinking, of a looking-at that sunders and compartmentalises’, and speaks of ‘an encroaching advance … toward that which is to be grasped by the eye’.90 It is all too reminiscent of Descartes ‘trying to be a spectator rather than an actor in all the comedies that are played out [in the world]’.91

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89. Heidegger, 1977, p. 134.

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90. ibid., p. 164.

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91. Descartes, 1984–91a, Part III, p. 125.

330

Moving forward in time to consider the last two centuries, Heidegger saw the disasters of Western materialism as stemming from a ‘forgetting of Being’, and the apparently opposed forces of capitalism and communism as merely variants in a common technicity and exploitation of nature. Our attempts to force nature according to our will are futile, he thought, and show no understanding of Being. This might sound like a pious reflection, and one that does not tally with reason. But there is meaning here that even the left hemisphere can understand. The domination and massive despoliation of nature and natural resources, the reduction of the world to commodity, has not led to the happiness it was designed to yield. According to Heidegger, what is everywhere apparently now demanded is tough, instant and, where necessary, violent action; ‘the long patient waiting for the gift’ has come to look like mere weakness.92

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92. See J. Young, 2004, p. 11.

330

SCHELER: THE IMPORTANCE OF VALUE IN CONSTITUTING REALITY

331

I need also to say something about Heidegger’s lesser known contemporary, colleague and friend, Max Scheler, who died young, but was the only person Heidegger believed truly understood him. Heidegger went so far, in fact, as to call Scheler ‘the strongest philosophical force in Germany today, nay, in contemporary Europe, and even in contemporary philosophy as such’.93 Scheler progressed further than Heidegger in certain philosophical directions, particularly the exploration of value and feeling, not as epiphenomena, but as constitutive of the phenomenological world. According to Scheler, values are not themselves feelings, though they reach us through the realm of feeling, much as colours reach us through the realm of sight. Scheler, like other phenomenological philosophers, emphasised the interpersonal nature of experience, particularly the nature of emotion, which he thought transcended the individual, and belonged to a realm in which such boundaries no longer applied. According to Scheler’s phenomenology in The Nature of Sympathy, which he supported by an examination of child development and linguistics, and which has been corroborated by research since his death in 1928,94 our early experience of the world is intersubjective and does not include an awareness of self as distinct from other.95 There is, instead, ‘an immediate flow of experiences, undifferentiated as between mine and thine, which actually contains both our own and others’ experiences intermingled and without distinction from one another’.96

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94. See n. 26 above; as well as the thesis put forward by Peter Hobson (2004).

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95. Scheler, 1954, pp. 244–52.

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93. Heidegger, ‘In Memoriam Max Scheler’, a eulogy on the death of Max Scheler delivered at the University of Marburg on 21 May 1928 (1984, p. 50).

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96. ibid., p. 246.

332

Scheler’s view that emotion is irreducible, and plays a grounding role in experience, relates to what has been called the primacy of affect (I will deal with this in the next chapter). In this, as Scheler’s translator Manfred Frings notes, he followed Pascal, who, mathematician that he was, famously asserted that the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.97 But, for Scheler, it was not just any affect, however, that was primary, but that of love itself. For him, man is essentially ens amans, a being that loves. In Scheler’s paradigm, this attractive power (in the literal sense of the word) is as mysterious and fundamental as the attractive power of gravity in the physical universe.

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97. ’Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point’: Pascal, 1976, §277 (Lafuma §224).

333

Value, for Scheler, is a pre-cognitive aspect of the existing world, which is neither purely subjective (i.e. ‘whatever I take it to be’) nor purely consensual (i.e. ‘whatever we agree it to be’). It is not, he asserts, something which we derive, or put together from some other kind of information, any more than we derive a colour, or come to a conclusion about it, by making a calculation. It comes to us in its own right, prior to any such calculation being made. This position is importantly related to two right-hemisphere themes which we have encountered already: the importance of context and of the whole. For example, the same act carried out by two different people may carry an entirely different value, which is why morality can never be a matter of actions or consequences taken out of context, whether that be the broader context or that of the mental world of the individual involved (the weakness of a too rigidly codified judicial system). Hence we judge some things that would out of context be considered weaknesses to be part of what is valuable or attractive in the context of a particular person’s character; we do not arrive at a judgment on a person by summing the totality of their characteristics or acts, but judge their characteristics or acts by the ‘whole’ that we know to be that person.98 (That is not to deny that there might build up so many incongruent ‘parts’ that one was no longer able to resist the judgment they invited, with a resulting revolution in the nature of the whole. It’s like making mayonnaise: add too much oil too fast and the suspension breaks down.)

334

Value is not a flavour that is added for some socially useful purpose; it is not a function or consequence of something else, but a primary fact. Scheler referred to the capacity for appreciating value as Wertnehmung, a concept which has been translated into the rather less accommodating English language as ‘value-ception’. For him this value-ception governs the type of attention that we pay to anything, and by which we learn more about it. Our value-ceptive knowledge of the whole governs our understanding of the parts, rather than the reverse. It is, in fact, one way of breaking into Escher’s circle of hands, with which this chapter began.

335

Scheler also held that values form a hierarchy.99 Of course one may or may not agree with him here – these are matters of judgment and intuition, rather than argument – but what seems to me significant is that, without knowing anything about hemisphere differences, he perfectly illustrates the polarity of value systems of the two hemispheres. The right hemisphere sees the lower values as deriving their power from the higher ones which they serve; the left hemisphere is reductionist, and accounts for higher values by reference to lower values, its governing values of use and pleasure. Scheler’s hierarchy begins with the lowest level, of what he calls sinnliche Werte, or values of the senses – whether something is pleasant or unpleasant. Values of utility (or uselessness) are on the same level as those of the senses, since ‘nothing can meaningfully be called useful except as a means to pleasure; utility … in reality has no value except as a means to pleasure.’100 The next level is that of Lebenswerte, ‘values of life’, or vitality: what is noble or admirable, such as courage, bravery, readiness to sacrifice, daring, magnanimity, loyalty, humility, and so on; or, on the contrary, what is mean (gemein), such as cowardice, pusillanimity, self-seeking, small-mindedness, treachery and arrogance.101 Then comes the realm of the geistige Werte, values of the intellect or spirit – principally justice, beauty and truth, with their opposites. The final realm is that of das Heilige, the holy.

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100. Scheler, 1998, pp. 124–5. It is a perverse inversion, a product of modern humanity’s ressentiment, according to Scheler, that has placed pleasure below utility, with the result that the means of pleasure can now be acquired only by those who, paradoxically, value utility more highly. Consequently nobody wins.

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99. Scheler, 1973.

336

It is relevant to the thesis of this book that there are important qualities which happen to be instrumentally useful, and therefore should be pursued on utilitarian grounds, but that doing so makes no sense, since they cannot be grasped by an effort of will, and the attempt to do so merely drives them further away. This is a point made with great subtlety and elegance by the philosopher Jon Elster, in his brilliant book Sour Grapes: as typical of such values he mentions wisdom, humility, virtue, courage, love, sympathy, admiration, faith and understanding.102 It is yet another Gödelian point of weakness in rationalism (his book is subtitled Studies in the Subversion of Rationality). If pursued for their utility, they vanish into nothing. All such values belong to the higher levels of Scheler’s hierarchy. The values of the useful and pleasurable, those of the lowest rank, are the only ones to which left-hemisphere modes of operation are applicable – and even these are often self-defeating to pursue (as the paradox of hedonism demonstrates).103 As things are re-presented in the left hemisphere, it is their use-value that is salient. In the world it brings into being, everything is either reduced to utility or rejected with considerable vehemence, a vehemence that appears to be born of frustration, and the affront to its ‘will to power’. The higher values in Scheler’s hierarchy, all of which require affective or moral engagement with the world, depend on the right hemisphere.

It is said that the meaning of the Hebrew words translated as ‘good and evil’, in the Genesis myth of Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, ‘mean precisely the useful and the useless, in other words, what is useful for survival and what is not’.104

1029

101. Scheler, 1998, p. 127.

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102. See pp. 180–81 below: Elster, 1983.

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103. First formulated by Henry Sidgwick in the Methods of Ethics, it is most succinctly expressed by Victor Frankl: ‘… happiness … cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself’ (1984, p. 17).

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104. Watts, 1963, p. 9. See also Wilber, 2001, p. 30.

336

TWO WORLDS

337

If a left-hemisphere process consistently seems to run up against the limits of its own method and needs to transcend them, that is convincing evidence that the reality it is trying to describe is something Other. The fact that in the twentieth century philosophers, like physicists, increasingly arrived at conclusions that are at variance with their own left-hemisphere methodology, and suggest the primacy of the world as the right hemisphere would deliver it, tells us something important.

Returning from the realm of philosophy to the use of language in everyday experience, we may also be aware of another reality, that of the right hemisphere – yet feel that explicitness forces us towards acknowledging only the world of the left hemisphere. We live, in other words, in two different types of world. There should tend, therefore, to be two meanings to most words that we commonly use to describe our relationship with the world. They will not all be like ‘grasp’ – willed, self-serving, unidirectional.

337

Seeing the world

337

Probably the most important metaphor of our relationship to the world is that of sight. ‘Knowing as seeing’ is one of the most consistent of all metaphors, and exists in all Indo-European languages, suggesting that it developed early in the Indo-European Ursprache (or ‘primal’ language).105 It is deeply ingrained in the way we apprehend the world. ‘I see,’ we say, meaning ‘I understand.’

In the era of universal CCTV surveillance, mobile phones that ‘capture’ video, and so on, many people imagine their eyes to be something like the lens of a camera on a moving swivel, perhaps a bit like a film-maker’s camera – just as our model of thinking and remembering is that of the computer, with its inert memory banks. The image suggests that we choose where we point our attention; in that respect we see ourselves as supremely active, and self-determining. As to the ‘impressions’ we receive, we are like a photographic plate, taking a faithful record of the world ‘out there’; and in that we pride ourselves on objectivity, being supremely passive. The process is linear, unidirectional, acquisitive, and is the left hemisphere’s vision of vision.

But the camera model is just as misleading and restrictive as the computer model. We know that we are neither as active in choosing where we direct our attention, nor as passive in the process of seeing, as this account suggests. There is another story to be told about seeing, and it is one that is better supported by neuroscience. It is also more in keeping with the right hemisphere’s view of the world. According to this view, we are already in a relationship with the world, which helps to direct our attention; and which also means that we bring something of ourselves to the process of creating a ‘vision’ of the world.

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105. Sweetser, 1990.

338

Are we active choosers?

339

Take first the idea that we are active choosers of where we look. On its own the left hemisphere is remarkably entrapped by its vision.106 Once it sees something, it locks onto it, in a way that has little to do with choice. The world that it would be choosing from is, in any case, provided by the broader attention of the right hemisphere, and often what engages the focus of our attention comes to us pre-consciously, and bypasses any willed action. For example, the eye is ‘caught’, as we say, by salient words or names that leap out of the page (words which are probably undiscoverable again once we try to find them, and the narrow attentional beam of the left hemisphere comes into play). In practice so-called ‘pre-attentional’ processing means that before we can have had a chance to read what is there, we notice pre-consciously whatever has a particular affective charge or demand on our attention.107 So it is clearly not true that we have to attend to something consciously before we can know it: we can only select what to attend to when we know what it is we are dealing with. We know it first, then are drawn to attend, so as to know more – Escher’s hands again. The world comes to meet us and acts to attract our gaze. Vitality, life and movement themselves draw the eye. The figure of someone walking by distracts us; it is hard not to succumb even to the television if a set is switched on anywhere in the room, because it portrays life and movement. In a room with a fire, we are drawn to looking at it; in the pre-TV era it was the focus of attention for a social gathering (focus is simply the Latin word for ‘hearth’), and it functioned as the TV now does to allow closeness without having to ‘focus’ too explicitly on one another. In this it fulfilled another, social, end.

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107. Goodale & Milner, 1995.

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106. See pp. 45 & 86 above.

339

The difficult bit about the ‘stickiness’ of the left hemisphere is that once we have already decided what the world is going to reveal, we are unlikely to get beyond it. We are prisoners of expectation.

New experience, as it is first ‘present’ to the mind, engages the right hemisphere, and as the experience becomes familiar, it gets ‘re-presented’ by the left hemisphere. Not only does the left hemisphere seem to specialise, as Goldberg and Costa observed, in dealing with what is (already) familiar, but whatever it is the left hemisphere deals with is bound to become familiar all too quickly, because there is a tendency for it to keep recurring to what it already knows. This has implications for the kind of knowledge the left hemisphere can have. The essential problem is that the mind can only truly know, in the sense of bring into sharp focus, and ‘see clearly’, what it has itself made. It therefore knows – in the sense of certain knowledge (wissen), the sort of knowledge that enables a thing to be pinned down and used – only what has been re-presented (in the left hemisphere), not what is present as a whole (before the right hemisphere).

341

In a now famous experiment by Simons and Chabris, subjects were asked to watch a short video clip showing a basketball game in a relatively confined indoor setting.108 They were asked to count how many times one team took possession of the ball. When asked afterwards, most observers were completely oblivious of the fact that a figure in a grotesque gorilla suit walks into the middle of the mêlée, turns to face the camera, beats his chest with his fists, dances a jig, and strolls nonchalantly out the other side of the picture – something so comically blatant on second viewing, once one knows what to expect, that it is hard to believe one could really have missed it. As they and others have neatly and dramatically demonstrated, we see, at least consciously, only what we are attending to in a focussed way (with the conscious left hemisphere). Since what we select to attend to is guided by our expectations of what it is we are going to see, there is a circularity involved which means we experience more and more only what we already know. Our incapacity to see the most apparently obvious features of the world around us, if they do not fit the template we are currently working with (part of what Noë and O’Regan have dubbed ‘the grand illusion’),109 is so entrenched that it is hard to know how we can ever come to experience anything truly new.

1029

108. Simons & Chabris, 1999.

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109. Noë & O’Regan, 2000; Noë, 2002; Kovács, Papathomas, Yang et al., 1996.

341

Neurocognitivists say that we can re-cognise, and therefore know, something only if we have already got the model of it in our brain.110 That does perfectly describe left-hemisphere processes: but it would mean that we were forever trapped in the re-presented, no longer alive, world of the left hemisphere’s knowledge, forever re-experiencing the familiar, the world forever going stale. We’d be back to the hall of mirrors. It doesn’t explain, either, how we could get to know something in the first place – for the model to get into our brain at all. It’s Escher’s hands again.

The left hemisphere will never help us here. As one researcher has put it, the left hemisphere on its own, for example after a right-hemisphere stroke, just ‘sees what it expected to see’.111 We need, as Heraclitus pointed out, to expect the unexpected: ‘he who does not expect will not find out the unexpected, for it is trackless and unexplored’.112 In other words we must learn to use a different kind of seeing: to be vigilant, not to allow the right hemisphere’s options to be too quickly foreclosed by the narrower focussing of the left hemisphere.

1029

110. Ito, 2000.

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111. Schutz, 2005, p. 11.

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112. Heraclitus, fr. VII (Diels 8, Marcovich 11), in Kahn, 1979 (Kahn’s translation).

342

It is the task of the right hemisphere to carry the left beyond, to something new, something ‘Other’ than itself. The left hemisphere’s grasp of the world is essentially theoretical, and is self-referring. In that respect it gives validity to the post-modern claim that language is a self-enclosed system of signs – but if, and only if, it is a product of the left hemisphere alone. By contrast, for the right hemisphere there is, as Johnson said of theories about literature, always an appeal open to nature: it is open to whatever is new that comes from experience, from the world at large.113

1030

113. ‘There is always an appeal open from criticism to nature’: Johnson, 1963, p. 110.

342

The corollary of this impact of expectation on attention is that the left hemisphere delivers what we know, rather than what we actually experience. This can be seen in its drawing skills. It will even draw the bones it knows to be within the human figure (so-called ‘X-ray’ drawings), and has a poor grasp of relative scale, spatial relationships and depth.

343

There is an inevitable relationship between certainty and ‘re-cognition’, the return to something already familiar. Conscious knowledge, the knowledge that characterises left-hemisphere understanding, depends on its object being fixed – otherwise it cannot be known. Thus it is only its re-presentation in consciousness, after it has already become present to the unconscious mind, that enables us to know something consciously. There is neurophysiological evidence that conscious awareness lags behind unconscious apprehension by nearly half a second.114 Chris Nunn, in a recent book on consciousness and the brain, writes that, as a consequence, ‘bizarre phenomena can occur like consciously perceiving an object to be of some illusory size, but nevertheless unconsciously adjusting one’s grasp correctly in relation to its actual size’.115 To know something consciously, to be aware of it, requires memory. He writes:

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115. Nunn, 2005, p. 195.

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At the most basic level, one cannot sustain attention to anything unless there is some form of memory of what one’s attention was doing a moment ago and of what the ‘anything’ is. [Conscious] attention is thus entirely dependent for its very moment-to-moment existence on intrinsic memory … Then again, the objects on which attention focuses seem to be available because they have been remembered. They are, in a sense objects extracted from memory that happen to coincide with features of the world ‘out there’.

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This is a neurocognitive expression of the phenomenological truth that what we know with our conscious left hemisphere is already in the past, no longer ‘alive’ but re-presented.116 And it takes us back to Jung: ‘all cognition is akin to recognition’.117

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116. ‘The external world is really there around us. That its existence is normally veiled is due not to existence but to our eyes. The habitual way of consciousness makes us look at things mechanically and think them dead. If only this mechanical view is abandoned, then existence is exposed in its nakedness… . Zen is not, in my view, philosophy or mysticism. It is simply a practice of readjustment of nervous activity. That is, it restores the distorted nervous system to its normal functioning.’ Sekida, 1975, pp. 103 & 211.

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117. See p. 97: C. Jung, vol. 9ii, p. 287.

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Amazingly enough, this understanding of the past condition of knowledge is embodied in the Greek word, eidenai, ‘to know’, arising at the very moment in cultural history where we were moving towards a more conscious awareness of mental processes.118 Eidenai is related to idein (‘to see’), and in fact originally meant ‘to have seen’.

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Are we passive receivers?

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The second part of the camera image is passive receptivity. But we never just ‘see’ something in the sense that a photographic plate receives rays of light.119 In the real world we bring a lot of our selves to the party. And that means gaze alters what it finds.

This used to be expressed in the idea, prevalent in the Ancient World, and again at the Renaissance, of the rays that come from the eye, from a deep source of life and energy within. Homer describes the beams, ‘penetrating as the sun’, which come from the eye of the eagle. Of the human eye Empedocles wrote that, when it had been created, ‘the primeval fire hid itself in the round pupil’, protected by delicate membranes from the waters flowing round it.120 And Plato, in the Timaeus, for once seems almost to anticipate the phenomenologists when he writes that a smooth, dense stream of gentle light from the purest fire within us merges with the light from what it sees, so that ‘one body’ is formed between ourselves and the object of our vision, conveying the ‘motions’ of what is seen into every part of our own body and soul.121

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The phrase ‘gazing into someone’s eyes’ goes further, and suggests that something actually emanates from our eyes and enters into the object of our attention, as in the Elizabethan conceit of the dart that comes from the lover’s eye, or even more the lovers of Donne’s Extasie for whom

Our eye-beames twisted, and did thred

Our eyes, upon one double string.

In those beams from the lover’s eye, one can also sense the profound, reciprocating communication that the eye offers. In looking, in other words, we enter into a reciprocal relationship: the seeing and the seen take part in one another’s being. The camera model is merely that of the left hemisphere, whose sequential analytic grasp of things does not reach to reverberative, reciprocal movement, the betweenness of sight. Some famous passages of Husserl were succinctly anticipated by Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell when he wrote ‘A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.’

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Gaze is active all right. Pliny the Elder wrote in his Natural History of the basilisk, a sort of venomous reptile that could kill with its gaze, and the belief in such a creature was current until the Renaissance.122 This embodies a truth about attention. The focussed but detached attention of the surgeon, with intent to care, may easily mimic the focussed but detached attention of the torturer, with intent to control; only the knowledge of the intention changes the way in which we understand the act. And, if I am its recipient, it changes my self-experience, too. It is in fact the detachment with which the detailed plans of the extermination camps were developed, often relying on the expertise of engineers, physicians and psychiatrists, that makes the Holocaust so particularly chilling. We say, and we feel, that the human being is reduced to the status of a machine, or of a part in a machine, and in doing so we acknowledge that the object is changed by the way in which it is attended to. Even with a corpse, the mode of attention alters what is found. In China the body, including the dead body, is viewed as an organism: once attacked with a scalpel, however, it reveals itself to be made of apparently divisible parts.123

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122. Pliny, 1991, Bk. 8, §78 (pp. 117–18).

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123. Bray, 1993, vol. 1, pp. 728–54; J. Needham, 1954–98, vol. 2 (1956), pp. 85–93.

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Science must above all divest itself of what will distort. Of course, to abandon ourselves to every personal whim or passion could never lead to any kind of shared truth. But achieving such lack of distortion is a much more subtle process than it may appear. Objectivity requires interpretation of what one finds, depends on imagination for its achievement.124 Detachment has a deeply ambiguous nature. The cool, detached stance of the scientific or bureaucratic mind ultimately may lead where we do not wish to follow. And the relationship implied by the left-hemisphere attention brought to bear through the scientific method, with its implied materialism, is not no relationship – merely a disengaged relationship, implying, incorrectly, that the observer does not have an impact on the observed (and is not altered by what he or she observes). The betweenness is not absent, just denied, and therefore of a particular – particularly ‘cold’ – kind. We cannot know something without it being known to us – we cannot see what it would be like if it were not we that were knowing it. Thus every thing we apprehend is the way it is because we see it in that way rather than another way. When science adopts a view of its object from which everything ‘human’ has as far as possible been removed, bringing a focussed, but utterly detached attention to bear, it is merely exercising another human faculty, that of standing back from something and seeing it in this detached, in some important sense denatured, way. There is no reason to see that particular way as privileged, except that it enables us to do certain things more easily, to use things, to have power over things – the preoccupation of the left hemisphere.

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The right hemisphere’s gaze is intrinsically empathic, by contrast, and acknowledges the inevitability of ‘betweenness’: in fact it is the fact of gaze normally being an empathic process that makes the detached stare so destructive. Merleau-Ponty wrote:

My eye for me is a certain power of making contact with things, and not a screen on which they are projected … The other’s gaze transforms me into an object, and mine him, only if both of us withdraw into the core of our thinking nature [left hemisphere], if we both make ourselves into an inhuman gaze, if each of us feels his actions to be not taken up as understood, but observed as if they were an insect’s. This is what happens, for instance, when I fall under the eyes of a stranger. But even then the objectification of each by the other’s gaze is felt as unbearable only because it takes the place of a possible communication.125

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125. Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 361.

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Elsewhere Merleau-Ponty refers to the moment of approach when ‘vision ceases to be solipsistic’ and ‘the other turns back upon me the luminous rays in which I had caught him’.126

Merleau-Ponty was aware not only of the importance of embodiment in forming the basis of the intersubjective world, but of the ambiguities of vision, with its potential either to alienate and objectify, or alternatively to form the medium of intersubjectivity. One of his best-known works is entitled The Visible and the Invisible. If the flesh is viewed as wholly opaque – in other words, if we take into account only the realm of the visible – it acts as an obstacle, something that alienates the viewer from what is seen. But if viewed another way, seen through as much as seen, the ‘thickness’ (l’épaisseur, implying something between transparency and opacity) of the flesh, far from being an obstacle, is what enables us to be aware of the other and of ourselves as embodied beings, and becomes the means of communication between the two.127 (In L’oeil et l’esprit, he uses the analogy of something seen through water at the bottom of a pool – and the word used here of the semi-translucent water is again l’épaisseur, where again the English translation has to make do with the rather too literal ‘thickness’).128 Note that it must retain its semi-transparent status, uniting the visible and the invisible: complete transparency would just render it invisible, and once again we become alienated, with no means to communicate.129

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126. Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 78.

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127. ‘The thickness of flesh’, Merleau-Ponty wrote, ‘between the seer and the thing is constitutive for the thing of its visibility as for the seer of his corporeity; it is not an obstacle between them, it is their means of communication’ (1968, p. 135). ‘C’est que l’épaisseur de chair entre le voyant et la chose est constitutive de sa visibilité à elle comme de sa corporéité à lui; ce n’est pas un obstacle entre lui et elle, c’est leur moyen de communication’ (1964a, p. 178).

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128. Merleau-Ponty, 1964b, p. 70.

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How we see the world alters not just others, but who we are. We need to be careful what we spend our time attending to, and in what way. Participants in a general knowledge quiz were primed in one of three ways, by engaging in activities that made them think about the stereotypes of professors, secretaries or hooligans. Those primed with the professor stereotype scored 60 per cent, those primed with the hooligan stereotype scored only 40 per cent, and those primed with the secretary stereotype scored somewhere in-between.130 In another test, those primed with ‘punk’ stereotypes were more rebellious and less conformist than those primed with ‘accountant’ stereotypes.131 Similarly, after playing a realistic and aggressive video game, participants, especially young men, became more likely to respond aggressively if provoked.132 People primed with stereotypes of elderly people (such as ‘sentimental’, ‘grey-haired’, ‘playing bingo’) become more conservative in their opinions; those primed with politician stereotypes become more long-winded. If primed with positive associations of the ageing process (such as wise and experienced), elderly people perform better on memory tests than those primed with negative associations (such as ‘senile’ or demented).133 Nurses working with elderly people, who are, if you like, in a state of perpetual priming, performed worse on memory tasks than those who had infrequent contact with old people.134 Old people primed with negative stereotypes of ageing can even give up the will to live.135

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130. Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 1998.

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131. Pendry & Carrick, 2001.

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132. Anderson & Dill, 2000.

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133. B. Levy, 1996.

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134. Dijksterhuis, Aarts, Bargh et al., 2000.

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135. Levy, Ashman & Dror, 1999–2000.

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What we attend to, and how we attend to it, changes it and changes us. Seeing is not just ‘the most efficient mechanism for acquiring knowledge’, as scientists tend to see it.136 It is that, of course, but it is also, and before anything else, the main medium by which we enact our relationship with the world. It is an essentially empathic business.

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136. Zeki, 1999, p.

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Mutual gaze, and particularly shared averted gaze towards another object, are highly evolved characteristics. Apart from humans, only some apes and monkeys, where they have had prolonged contact with humans, may be capable of undertaking shared gaze to another object.137 Dogs are exquisitely sensitive to human attention, especially direction of gaze and expressions of the eyes:138 they may be able to share attention, and some other mammals are certainly able to follow the direction of gaze, but it is harder to be sure what level of attention is exhibited.139 Most cats, despite prolonged contact with humans, are unable to understand that you are interested in something else, and do not engage with the direction of your gaze. It’s no better if you point: pointing just results in the cat looking at your finger. A dog, however, will understand that you are engaged by an interest that lies in a certain direction and its own gaze is empathically entrained in the same direction. In both shared and mutual gaze, in which we feel a link with the mind of the other individual, the right hemisphere provides the neurological substrate. When we shift our gaze where we see another looking, we do so via the right hemisphere.140 In humans, mutual gaze, even when it is averted (i.e. when two people are mutually aware of their common attention to the same object), is accompanied by activation of a highly distributed network extending throughout the right hemisphere.141 The interpretation of faces is the prerogative of the right hemisphere; in looking at the face of one’s partner (compared with an unknown face) the right insula increases in activity. Viewing one’s own face (by contrast with an unknown face) induces activation in the left prefrontal and superior temporal cortex as well as a more extensive right limbic activation.142 So it seems that sharing attention, and looking into the eyes of another, as well as recognising the face of someone very close to one, all increase activity in the right hemisphere over and above what would be needed to process faces alone. In fact, shared mental states in general activate the right hemisphere.143 And all aspects of empathic attention are disrupted in autism: eye contact,144 the capacity to follow another’s gaze,145 joint or shared attention,146 and understanding the mind behind the gaze.147 There may also be deficits of gaze attention in schizophrenia.148

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137. Emery, 2000; Emery, Lorincz, Perrett et al., 1997. It is possible that some birds reared by humans may be capable of joint attention (Pepperberg & McLaughlin, 1996).

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138. Kaminski, 2009, pp. 103–7; Call, Bräuer, Kaminski et al., 2003; Virányi, Topál, Gácsi et al., 2004.

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139. Dogs may have a greater capacity than some primates to understand and share human attention: see Udell & Wynne, 2008; Miklósi, Polgárdi, Topál et al., 1998. A number of domesticated species can follow the direction of gaze (Tomasello, Call & Hare, 1998), e.g. goats (Kaminski, Riedel, Call et al., 2005) and dolphins (Tschudin, Call, Dunbar et al., 2001).

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140. Okada, Sato & Toichi, 2006.

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141. Wicker, Michel, Henaff et al., 1998. In both averted and direct mutual gaze, in addition to the expected ventral occipito-temporal region of the right hemisphere, areas including the occipital part of the fusiform gyrus, the right parietal lobule, the right inferior temporal gyrus and both middle temporal gyri are also activated. In both conditions there is an increase in activity in the right superior parietal lobule, right precentral gyrus and right inferior frontal gyrus, as well as the right amygdala, right pulvinar and bilateral mediodorsal thalamic nuclei. See also Kingstone, Friesen & Gazzaniga, 2000.

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142. Kircher, Senior, Phillips et al., 2001.

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143. Decety & Chaminade, 2003.

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144. Kanner, 1943.

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145. Leekam, Hunnisett & Moore, 1998.

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146. Charman, Swettenham, Baron-Cohen et al., 1997.

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147. Baron-Cohen, Campbell, Karmiloff-Smith et al., 1995; Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright & Jolliffe, 1997; Leekam, Baron-Cohen, Perrett et al., 1997.

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148. Rosse, Kendrick, Wyatt et al., 1994.

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It is therefore problematic for science and often philosophy that an abstruse and abstracted language, and an alienating vision, are seen as the proper and only approach to truth. Descartes, according to the philosopher David Levin, ‘prefers the distance of vision … even when it means dehumanisation’.149 But in this he was pursuing the belief that acknowledging our relationship with the world will make it obtrude. In reality it obtrudes more when not acknowledged. The baggage gets on board, as Dennett puts it, without being inspected. In a scientific paper, one may not say ‘I saw it happen’, but ‘the phenomenon was observed’. In Japan, however, science students, who ‘observe’ phenomena, do so with quite a different meaning, and in quite a different spirit, from their Western counterparts. The word kansatsu, which is translated as ‘observe’, is closer to the meaning of the word ‘gaze’, which we use only when we are in a state of rapt attention in which we lose ourselves, and feel connected to the other. The syllable kan in kansatsu contains the nuance that the one who gazes comes to feel a ‘one-body-ness’ with the object of gaze.150

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149. Levin, 1999, p. 47 (emphasis in original).

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150. Kawasaki, 1992, quoted by Ogawa, 1998, p. 153.

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So the eye has a potential to connect and to divide. And in fact even the hand does not have to be as I described it – willed, self-serving, unidirectional. The hand has other modes of being. An outstretched hand can mean other things – can comfort, cure, or quicken (note that the body of Adam, in Michelangelo’s famous representation, is vivified by divine communication to his left hand, and thus to the right hemisphere; see Figure 4.3 below).

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And since attention is modified by the intention that lies behind it, even grasp can bring to life, when the context changes, as in the image in the church of St Saviour in Khora (see Plate 4), in which the figure of Christ in triumph moves at the Last Day like a whirlwind over the tombs of the dead, grasping them by the arm and wresting them from the sleep of the grave.

The hand is the vehicle of touch, as well as grasp, and therefore the origin of the metaphor of ‘tact’. In fact to attend means, precisely, to reach out a hand towards: we reach out – ‘ad-tend’ – in order to give, as well as to take.

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FAUX AMIS

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The different ontological status of the two hemispheres impinges on the meaning of all the philosophical terms that are used by us to understand the world, since both hemispheres think they understand them, but do so in different ways, each transforming the concept or experience by the context (that of the left- or right- hemisphere world) in which it finds itself. Like the left-hand and right-hand worlds seen by Alice on either side of the looking glass, each has its own version of reality, in which things superficially look the same but are different. I will conclude the chapter with brief discussions of a few of these faux amis, or ‘false friends’, that arise where the right and left hemispheres understand words differently.

352

‘Knowledge’ and ‘truth’ I have discussed – again there are two versions: one purporting to be impersonal, static, complete, a thing, and the other personal, provisional, a matter of degree, a journey. ‘Belief’ is closely related and has two meanings too.

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Belief

353

Believing is not to be reduced to thinking that such-and-such might be the case. It is not a weaker form of thinking, laced with doubt. Sometimes we speak like this: ‘I believe that the train leaves at 6.13’, where ‘I believe that’ simply means that ‘I think (but am not certain) that’. Since the left hemisphere is concerned with what is certain, with knowledge of the facts, its version of belief is that it is just absence of certainty. If the facts were certain, according to its view, I should be able to say ‘I know that’ instead. This view of belief comes from the left hemisphere’s disposition towards the world: interest in what is useful, therefore fixed and certain (the train timetable is no good if one can’t rely on it). So belief is just a feeble form of knowing, as far as it is concerned.

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But belief in terms of the right hemisphere is different, because its disposition towards the world is different. The right hemisphere does not ‘know’ anything, in the sense of certain knowledge. For it, belief is a matter of care: it describes a relationship, where there is a calling and an answering, the root concept of ‘responsibility’.151 Thus if I say that ‘I believe in you’, it does not mean that I think that such-and-such things are the case about you, but can’t be certain that I am right. It means that I stand in a certain sort of relation of care towards you, that entails me in certain kinds of ways of behaving (acting and being) towards you, and entails on you the responsibility of certain ways of acting and being as well. It is an acting ‘as if’ certain things were true about you that in the nature of things cannot be certain. It has the characteristic right-hemisphere qualities of being a betweenness: a reverberative, ‘re-sonant’, ‘respons-ible’ relationship, in which each party is altered by the other and by the relationship between the two, whereas the relationship of the believer to the believed in the left-hemisphere sense is inert, unidirectional, and centres on control rather than care. I think this is what Wittgenstein was trying to express when he wrote that ‘my’ attitude towards the other is an ‘attitude towards a soul. I am not of the opinion that he has a soul.’152 An ‘opinion’ would be a weak form of knowledge: that is not what is meant by a belief, a disposition or an ‘attitude’.

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152. Wittgenstein, 1967b, Part II, iv, p. 178.

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This helps illuminate belief in God. This is not reducible to a question of a factual answer to the question ‘does God exist?’, assuming for the moment that the expression ‘a factual answer’ has a meaning.153 It is having an attitude, holding a disposition towards the world, whereby that world, as it comes into being for me, is one in which God belongs. The belief alters the world, but also alters me. Is it true that God exists? Truth is a disposition, one of being true to someone or something. One cannot believe in nothing and thus avoid belief altogether, simply because one cannot have no disposition towards the world, that being in itself a disposition. Some people choose to believe in materialism; they act ‘as if’ such a philosophy were true. An answer to the question whether God exists could only come from my acting ‘as if’ God is, and in this way being true to God, and experiencing God (or not, as the case might be) as true to me. If I am a believer, I have to believe in God, and God, if he exists, has to believe in me.154 Rather like Escher’s hands, the belief must arise reciprocally, not by a linear process of reasoning. This acting ‘as if’ is not a sort of cop-out, an admission that ‘really’ one does not believe what one pretends to believe. Quite the opposite: as Hans Vaihinger understood, all knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge, is no more than an acting ‘as if’ certain models were, for the time being, true.155 Truth and belief, once more, as in their etymology, are profoundly connected.156 It is only the left hemisphere that thinks there is certainty to be found anywhere.

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153. ‘Wittgenstein argued that a truly religious belief should not be understood as a kind of empirical claim, a botched attempt to speak objective truths. Rather it is “something like a passionate commitment to a system of reference … a way of living, or a way of assessing life. It’s passionately seizing hold of this interpretation.” ‘ Sass, 2001, p. 282, referring to Wittgenstein, 1984, p. 64e.

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154. The inevitable reciprocity of such relations is imaged in Meister Eckhart’s ‘the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me … one vision or seeing, and one knowing and loving’ (1957, p. 288).

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155. Vaihinger, 1935.

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Will

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Our primary being lies in a disposition towards the world – certainly not in a thought, or a whole panoply of thoughts, about the world, not even in a feeling or feelings about the world as such. Willing, like believing, with which I think it shares some properties, is thus better thought of as a matter of a disposition towards the world. The left-hemisphere disposition towards the world is that of use. Philosophy being a hyperconscious cognitive process, it may be hard to get away from the left hemisphere’s perspective that will is about control, and must lie in the conscious left hemisphere. But if our disposition towards the world, our relationship with it, alters, will has a different meaning. The disposition of the right hemisphere, the nature of its attention to the world, is one of care, rather than control. Its will relates to a desire or longing towards something, something that lies beyond itself, towards the Other.

357

Evidence from a number of different sources suggests, as discussed in the previous chapter, that the mind arranges experience, grouping things according to similarities, quite without the aid of language, and needs to do so in order to make any sense of it at all. This is clearly evident from the behaviour of birds and vertebrate animals, and must take place at a relatively low subcortical level, since some very rapid automatic reactions are based on a perception of what sort of a thing it is that is being reacted to. We also know that at higher levels both hemispheres take part in the process of identification. There are hints that the way in which they do this differs in some fundamental respects.157 For the concept of a ‘type’, too, can have two meanings – having only one ‘whatness’, it can nonetheless have two ‘hownesses’. In one sense, it refers to the category to which something can be reduced, because of a specific feature or features. But a child comes to understand the world, to learn about it, by seeing the shapes – both literally, the visuospatial shapes, and metaphorically, the structures – that stand forward in its experience, using a form of Gestalt perception, rather than by applying rules. This is the beginnings of the human faculty for seeing what Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations referred to as ‘family resemblances’, which associate individuals without there necessarily being any one defining feature that all members of the group have in common.158 It implies a sense of a something that has never yet been seen, and yet that something nonetheless has a meaning in relation to each of the exemplars that is experienced, and it becomes clearer only with more and more experience. So although we often think of a ‘type’ as a highly reduced phenomenon, ‘the lowest common denominator’ of a certain set of experiences, it can also be something much greater than any one experience, in fact lying beyond experience itself, and towards which our set of experiences may tend. If Bateson is right that all knowledge is knowledge of difference, this method is the only way to know anything: categorising something leads only to loss of the essential difference.

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157. Laeng, Zarrinpar & Kosslyn, 2003.

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158. Wittgenstein, 1967b, Part I, §67, p. 32.

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This is where we come back to the will. Some of the most powerful drivers of human behaviour are such ideal types – not ‘character types’, which are effectively stereotypes, but something akin to archetypes, that have living power in the imagination and can call us towards them. In his book De la Mettrie’s Ghost Chris Nunn deals with some of these, using the examples of ‘the noble Roman’ or ‘the saint’, which he describes as narratives of a certain way of being that we tell ourselves to make sense of our experience, and which in turn help to shape our responses to experience.159 These are types, but they have certain qualities that suggest a right hemisphere origin. They are not reductions (downwards), but aspirations (upwards); they are derived from experience, but are not encompassed by it; they have affective meaning for us, and are not simply abstractions; their structure, as Nunn points out, has much in common with narrative; they cannot be derived from or converted into rules or procedures. In fact one of the things that would most surely invalidate them would be a tendency for them to become just that – a set of rules or procedures: ‘do this and this, and you will be a saint’.

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159. Nunn, 2005, p. 195.

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To my way of thinking they have much in common with Jung’s archetypes. He saw these as bridging the unconscious realm of instinct and the conscious realm of cognition, in which each helps to shape the other,160 experienced through images or metaphors that carry over to us affective or spiritual meaning from an unconscious realm.161 In their presence we experience a pull, a force of attraction, a longing, which leads us towards something beyond our own conscious experience, and which Jung saw as derived from the broader experience of humankind. An ideal sounds like something by definition disembodied, but these ideals are not bloodless abstractions, and derive from our affective embodied experience.

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160. C. Jung, 1953–79, vol. 8, p. 271.

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161. ibid., vol. 9i, p. 267.

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For even the body has its different ‘hownesses’: in the realm of utility, on the one hand, it becomes the means by which we act on and manipulate the world; but, on the other, it is also the ultimate metaphor of all experience, including our experience of the highest realms of value. This is recognised by Laban when he notes that bodily ‘movement has always been used for two distinct aims: the attainment of tangible values in all kinds of work, and the approach to intangible values in prayer and worship’.162 The body, thus, holds in itself the dispositions of both hemispheres towards the world.

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162. Laban, 1960, p. 4.

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Familiarity and newness

359

An archetype may be familiar to us without our ever having come across it in experience. Familiarity is another ambiguous concept. It is not that one or other hemisphere ‘specialises in’, or perhaps even ‘prefers’, whatever it may be, but that each hemisphere has its own disposition towards it, which makes one or another aspect of it come forward – and it is that aspect which is brought out in the world of that hemisphere. The particular table at which I work, in all its individual givenness, is familiar to me as part of ‘my’ world and everything that matters to me (right hemisphere); tables generically are familiar precisely because they are generic (left hemisphere) – in the sense that there is nothing new or strange to come to terms with. Equally the Eiffel Tower is familiar to the man who has spent his life underneath its shadow (right hemisphere); the Eiffel Tower is familiar as a clichéd icon for Paris (left hemisphere). A piece of music I have passively heard and overheard is familiar to the point of having no life; a piece of music practised and struggled with by a musician is familiar to the point of coming alive. One is emptied of meaning by being constantly re-presented; the other is enriched in meaning by being constantly present – lived with, and actively incorporated into ‘my’ life.

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Newness, a related concept, is similarly distinct in its hemisphere-specific meanings. In one sense it is precisely the return from left-hemisphere familiarity to right-hemisphere familiarity, from inauthenticity to authenticity. It cannot be willed, though it might be much desired; it requires an (apparently passive) patient openness to whatever is, which allows us to see it as if for the very first time, and leads to what Heidegger called radical ‘astonishment’ before the world. That concept is also related to Jan Patoc?ka’s shakenness: a sort of elemental driving out of the complacency of our customary modes of seeing the world.163 It is what Wordsworth in particular strove to achieve: in Coleridge’s words,

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to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.164

It involves reconnection with the world which familiarity had veiled. It is at the furthest remove from the need to shock: it requires looking more carefully at what seems only too familiar, and seeing it perhaps for the very first time.

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164. Coleridge, 1965, vol. II, ch. xiv, p. 169.

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But there is also a quite different type of novelty, which can be achieved at will, by actively recombining already known elements in bizarre ways, thus breaking the conventions of our shared reality and getting as far as possible from anything that could be described as familiar. This places the already presented ‘parts’ in disjunctive combinations, and fractures the familiar (in the right hemisphere sense). It aims to produce a reaction of shock through its unflinching acceptance of the bizarre or alien. This is the sense in which the modernists aimed, in Pound’s phrase, to ‘make it new’, the sense of ‘The Shock of the New’.165 This type of novelty emanates from the world of the left hemisphere.

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Activity and passivity

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I described as ‘apparently passive’ the openness of the right hemisphere to whatever is. That is because, in the absence of an act of will, this is how the left hemisphere sees it. But there is a wise passivity that enables things to come about less by what is done than by what is not done, that opens up possibility where activity closes it down.

The dichotomy between activity and passivity comes about from the standpoint of a need for control. Passivity, from this perspective, is loss of control, loss of self-determination, loss of the capacity for effective, that is to say, useful, interaction – a failure of instrumentality. However, this takes no note of all the important states of affairs, beginning with sleep and ending with wisdom, discussed earlier in this chapter that cannot be brought about by an effort of will – where, in fact, an open receptiveness, which permits things to grow, is actually more productive. It is something like what Keats described as ‘negative capability’, that characteristic of a ‘man of achievement’, namely, ‘when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason’.166 Here the link with the capacity not to force things into certainty, clarity, fixity is made explicit, and again links it to the right hemisphere’s domain.

Ultimately we need to unite the ways of seeing that are yielded by both hemispheres. Above all the attention of the left hemisphere needs to be reintegrated with that of the right hemisphere if it is not to prove damaging.

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CONCLUSION

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I mentioned the importance of the intention behind attention. As may have become clear from the last chapter, the nature of language in the left hemisphere and its relationship with grasp imply the overriding value to it of use. The left hemisphere is always engaged in a purpose: it always has an end in view, and downgrades whatever has no instrumental purpose in sight. The right hemisphere, by contrast, has no designs on anything. It is vigilant for whatever is, without preconceptions, without a predefined purpose. The right hemisphere has a relationship of concern or care (what Heidegger calls Sorge) with whatever happens to be.

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If one had to encapsulate the principal differences in the experience mediated by the two hemispheres, their two modes of being, one could put it like this. The world of the left hemisphere, dependent on denotative language and abstraction, yields clarity and power to manipulate things that are known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualised, explicit, disembodied, general in nature, but ultimately lifeless. The right hemisphere, by contrast, yields a world of individual, changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate, living beings within the context of the lived world, but in the nature of things never fully graspable, always imperfectly known – and to this world it exists in a relationship of care. The knowledge that is mediated by the left hemisphere is knowledge within a closed system. It has the advantage of perfection, but such perfection is bought ultimately at the price of emptiness, of self-reference. It can mediate knowledge only in terms of a mechanical rearrangement of other things already known. It can never really ‘break out’ to know anything new, because its knowledge is of its own re-presentations only. Where the thing itself is ‘present’ to the right hemisphere, it is only ‘re-presented’ by the left hemisphere, now become an idea of a thing. Where the right hemisphere is conscious of the Other, whatever it may be, the left hemisphere’s consciousness is of itself.

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And this brings us finally to the third question I asked at the outset in this chapter: can all this tell us something about the nature of the brain? I think so. That answer is implicit in all that has gone before. There is no such thing as the brain, only the brain according to the right hemisphere and the brain according to the left hemisphere: the two hemispheres that bring everything into being also, inevitably, bring themselves – like Escher’s hands. So to some people the brain is a thing, and a particular type of thing, a machine; which is only to say that it is something we understand from the bottom up and which exists for a purpose we recognise. To others it is something the nature of which is unique, which we can understand, therefore, only by being content with a degree of not-knowing which opens the mind to whatever is, and whose purpose is not so easily determined. In other words, we should expect that some people will be confident that they know precisely what sort of thing the brain is, while others may know ‘precious little’ about that.167

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CHAPTER 5

THE PRIMACY OF THE RIGHT HEMISPHERE

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I believe that the relationship between the hemispheres is not equal, and that while both contribute to our knowledge of the world, which therefore needs to be synthesised, one hemisphere, the right hemisphere, has precedence, in that it underwrites the knowledge that the other comes to have, and is alone able to synthesise what both know into a usable whole.

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We might be persuaded by the fact that the left hemisphere provides a detailed and precise picture, to suppose that it, rather than its irritatingly imprecise counterpart, gives us the truth about the world. And its less engaged stance might be a clue that it is more trustworthy. However, the fact that disengaged attention is in some cases psychopathic tells us that the question has meaning for the value, including the moral value, of the world we experience. It’s an important question to decide – but there is a problem in reaching a conclusion here. Each hemisphere attends in a different way; different ways of attending produce different realities, including about this question of hemisphere difference. How to break out of the hermeneutic circle?

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One way of approaching the question would be to look at the results: to compare the results of adopting a more detached kind of attention to the world with the results of adopting a more engaged kind. Towards the end of this book I will do just that – look at how the assumption that the world is best understood according to the left hemisphere’s take, as a mechanism, compares with the assumption that the world is more like a living thing, a connected whole, as the right hemisphere would see it. I will do so without any special pleading, judging the answer according to the values of the left hemisphere, not those of the right. We can after all measure the consequences of the way we look at the world by what happens to it, and what happens to us. However, since attention alters us as well as what we attend to, the very judgment we made might reflect not so much reality as the nature of who we had become or were becoming. It seems hard to step outside this problem, which raises another circularity.

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This is why the last chapter looked for indications from philosophy. I began by suggesting that there might be some clues from physics, the other path by which we try to apprehend ultimate reality – if it is indeed another path, and not the same path in another light. There is a tendency for the life sciences to consider a mechanistic universe more ‘real’, even though physics long ago moved away from this legacy of nineteenth-century materialism, with the rather odd result that the inanimate universe has come to appear animate, to take part in mind, while the animate universe appears inanimate, mindless. Science has to prioritise clarity; detached, narrowly focussed attention; the knowledge of things as built up from parts; sequential analytic logic as the path to knowledge; and the prioritising of detail over the bigger picture. Like philosophy it comes at the world from the left hemisphere’s point of view. And the left hemisphere’s version of reality works well at the local level, the everyday, on which we are focussed by habit. There Newtonian mechanics rules; but it ‘frays at the edges’, once one pans out to get the bigger picture of reality, at the subatomic, or at the cosmic, level. Here uncertainty replaces certainty; the fixed turns out to be constantly changing and cannot be pinned down; straight lines are curved: in other words, Einstein’s laws account better than Newton’s. Straight lines, such as the horizon, are curved if one takes a longer view, and space itself is curved – so that the rectilinearity of the left hemisphere is a bit like the flat-Earther’s view: ‘that’s the way it looks here and now’. I would say that the shape, not just of space and time, but of our apprehension of them, is curved: beginning in the right hemisphere, passing through the realm of the left hemisphere somewhere in the middle, and returning to that of the right hemisphere. Reality has a roundness rather than rectilinearity, a theme I will return to at the end of this book.

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In the last chapter I pointed to the fact that in the twentieth century, despite the nature of the philosophic process, themes emerged from philosophical debate which, unknowingly, corroborate the right hemisphere’s understanding of the world. These include: empathy and intersubjectivity as the ground of consciousness; the importance of an open, patient attention to the world, as opposed to a wilful, grasping attention; the implicit or hidden nature of truth; the emphasis on process rather than stasis, the journey being more important than the arrival; the primacy of perception; the importance of the body in constituting reality; an emphasis on uniqueness; the objectifying nature of vision; the irreducibility of all value to utility; and creativity as an unveiling (no-saying) process rather than a wilfully constructive process.

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Wittgenstein spoke of ‘an experience that was, for him, a paradigm of the sense of ultimate value: the sense of wonder at the very existence of the world itself.’1 Heidegger said that what we call the pre-Socratic philosophers were not philosophers, but thinkers (Denker) who had no need of ‘philosophy’, caught up as they were in the radical astonishment of Being. For Plato, ‘the sense of wonder (thaumazein) is the mark of the philosopher – philosophy indeed has no other origin’;2 in fact he thought that theios phobos (sacred fear) was so profoundly moving and life-altering that the arts, which could summon it up, ought to be under strict censorship to preserve public order. Aristotle wrote that ‘it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin, and at first began, to philosophize.’3

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1. Wittgenstein, 1993, pp. 36–44: from Sass, 2001, p. 284.

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2. Plato, Theaetetus, 155d2 ff.

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3. Aristotle, Metaphysics, A 2, 982b11 ff.

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But already Democritus, a contemporary of Plato, starts to praise athaumastia and athambia, a refusal to be moved or amazed by anything; ‘the Stoic sages regard it as their highest aim not to lose their composure, and Cicero as well as Horace commends the nil admirari’ – to be astonished at nothing.4 The mark of the true philosopher becomes not the capacity to see things as they are, and therefore to be awestruck by the fact of Being, but precisely the opposite, to keep cool in the face of existence, to systematise and clarify the world, so that it is re-presented as an object of knowledge. The role of the philosopher, as of the scientist, becomes to demystify.

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4. Snell, 1960, p. 42. Democritus, along with Leucippus, is often thought of as the first scientific materialist. He also appears to have been the first person to believe he had a ‘theory of everything’, which led to his being branded by Montaigne and Pascal as impudent and over-reaching (Montaigne, ‘An apology for Raymond Sebond’, Essais, Bk. II:12 (1993, p. 545); Pascal, 1976, §72 (Lafuma §199)).

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The sense of awe which motivates philosophy was, however, never lost: even Descartes held that ‘wonder [is] the first of all the passions’.5 But it has also been perceived by many that wonder was not just the origin, but the aim, of philosophy. Thus to Goethe it was ‘the highest that man can attain’.6 Wittgenstein saw greater wisdom in mythic than in scientific accounts of the world, which ‘leave us with the distinct impression that everything has been accounted for; they give us the illusion of explaining a world that we might do better to wonder at … Wittgenstein criticises explanation in order to make way for wonder. Clarity for him was largely in the service of awe; his critical energies were directed at unmasking what he saw as the pseudo-explanations that tend to come between us and the world, blinding us to the sheer wonder of its existence.’7 Similarly Thomas Nagel writes: ‘Certain forms of perplexity – for example, about freedom, knowledge, and the meaning of life – seem to me to embody more insight than any of the supposed solutions to those problems.’8 And most recently Arne Naess put it in these words: ‘Philosophy begins and ends with wondering – profound wondering.’9 It is this that twentieth-century philosophy painstakingly regained.

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Descartes, 1984–91e, Part II, §53, p. 350. The opening words of Whitehead’s Nature and Life are: ‘Philosophy is the product of wonder’ (A. N. Whitehead, 1934, p. 9). And Einstein once said: ‘The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle’ (Einstein, 1940, p. 5).

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6. Eckermann, 1970, conversation of 18 February 1829, p. 296.

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7. Sass, 2001, p. 284.

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8. Nagel, 1986, p. 4.

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9. Naess, 2002, p. 3 (emphasis added).

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Philosophy shares the trajectory that I have described as typical of the relationship between the hemispheres. It begins in wonder, intuition, ambiguity, puzzlement and uncertainty; it progresses through being unpacked, inspected from all angles and wrestled into linearity by the left hemisphere; but its endpoint is to see that the very business of language and linearity must themselves be transcended, and once more left behind. The progression is familiar: from right hemisphere, to left hemisphere, to right hemisphere again.

This would also be in keeping with other evidence for the primary role of the right hemisphere in yielding the experiential world.

FURTHER EVIDENCE FOR THE PRIMARY ROLE OF THE RIGHT HEMISPHERE

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In fact we have already touched on a number of reasons for supposing that the right hemisphere plays a primary, grounding role in the relationship between the hemispheres. There is the primacy of broad vigilant attention: though focussed attention may appear to its owner to be under conscious control, in reality it is already spoken for; we direct attention according to what we are aware of, and for that we need broad, right-hemisphere, attention. Then there is the primacy of wholeness: the right hemisphere deals with the world before separation, division, analysis has transformed it into something else, before the left hemisphere has re-presented it. It is not that the right hemisphere connects – because what it reveals was never separated; it does not synthesise – what was never broken down into parts; it does not integrate – what was never less than whole.

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We have also looked at the role the right hemisphere plays in delivering what is new: its primacy of experience. What we know had to come into being first for the right hemisphere, since by definition at first it is new, and the right hemisphere delivers what is new as it ‘presences’ – before the left hemisphere gets to re-present it. And we have the fact that the left hemisphere’s most powerful tool, referential language, has its origins in the body and the right hemisphere: a sort of primacy of means.

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The origins of language in music and the body could be seen as part of a bigger picture, part of a primacy of the implicit. Metaphor (subserved by the right hemisphere) comes before denotation (subserved by the left). This is both a historical and an epistemological truth. Metaphorical meaning is in every sense prior to abstraction and explicitness. The very words tell one this: one cannot draw something away (Latin, abs- away, trahere pull), unless there is something to draw it away from. One cannot unfold something and make it explicit (Latin, ex- out, plicare fold), unless it is already folded. The roots of explicitness lie in the implicit. As Lichtenberg said, ‘Most of our expressions are metaphorical – the philosophy of our forefathers lies hidden in them.’10

Metaphor is not just a reflection of what has been, however, but the means whereby the truly new, rather than just the novel, may come about. When a metaphor actually lives in the mind it can generate new thoughts or understanding – it is cognitively real and active, not just a dead historical remnant of a once live metaphor, a cliché.11

All understanding, whether of the world or even of ourselves, depends on choosing the right metaphor. The metaphor we choose governs what we see. Even in talking about understanding we cannot escape metaphors. ‘Grasping’ things, for example, won’t get us as far as we would like, because the most important things in life refuse to be grasped in either sense. Like Tantalus’ grapes they retreat from the reaching hand.

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10. ‘Unsere meisten Ausdrücke sind metaphorisch, es steckt in denselben die Philosophie unserer Vorfahren’: Lichtenberg, 1967–72, Sudelbuch D (1773–5), §515, vol. 1, p. 308.

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11. See Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, pp. 82–5; Kemper, 1989; Gibbs & O’Brien, 1990; Nayak & Gibbs, 1990; Gentner, 1982; and Gentner & Gentner, 1983.

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The paradox of philosophy is that we need to get beyond what can be grasped or explicitly stated, but the drift of philosophy is always and inevitably back towards the explicit. Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Scheler, and the later Wittgenstein perceived that explicitness ties us down to what we already know, however much we may carry on ‘unfolding’ and ‘unfolding’ it. Implicitly, and at times explicitly, each of them tried to take philosophy beyond the explicit, therefore in one sense beyond itself. In doing so, they illuminated the limits of analytic language (‘whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent’). But the attempt still is worth making, indeed has to be made, and always will, provided only that one respects the limits to what can be achieved. ‘For an old psychologist and pied piper like me’, wrote Nietzsche, only too aware of the problems of language, ‘… precisely that which would like to stay silent has to become audible’.12

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These philosophers’ writings are replete with metaphorical images which not only embody, but themselves express, implicitness. Thus, perhaps echoing Heidegger’s circuitous path through the fields (Feldweg), Wittgenstein speaks of philosophical inquiry as, not an explicit statement, but a series of perspectives, like a number of discrete walks across a mountain range which will, perhaps, allow an idea of the whole to emerge. Three hundred years before either Heidegger or Wittgenstein, Donne had written: ‘On a huge hill, / Cragged, and steep, Truth stands, and hee that will / Reach her, about must, and about must goe …’13 Perhaps it is fitting that a poet should have got there first. This circular, or more accurately, spiral-like, progress is, again, very suggestive.

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12. Nietzsche, 1990, p. 31.

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13. Donne, ‘Satyre III’, lines 79–81.

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The biggest problem of explicitness, however, is that it returns us to what we already know. It reduces a unique experience, person or thing to a bunch of abstracted, therefore central, concepts that we could have found already anywhere else – and indeed had already. Knowing, in the sense of seeing clearly, is always seeing ‘as’ a something already known, and therefore not present but re-presented. Fruitful ambiguity is forced into being one thing or another. I started this chapter by suggesting that, because of its power to change, attention can also destroy. Many things that are important to us simply cannot withstand being too closely attended to, since their nature is to be indirect or implicit. Forcing them into explicitness changes their nature completely, so that in such cases what we come to think we know ‘certainly’ is in fact not truly known at all. Too much self-awareness destroys not just spontaneity, but the quality that makes things live; the performance of music or dance, of courtship, love and sexual behaviour, humour, artistic creation and religious devotion become mechanical, lifeless, and may grind to a halt if we are too self-aware.

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Those things that cannot sustain the focus of conscious attention are often the same things which cannot be willed, that come only as a by-product of something else; they shrink from the glare of the left hemisphere’s world. Some things, like sleep, simply cannot be willed.14 The frame of mind required to strive for them is incompatible with the frame of mind that permits them to be experienced. As Montaigne wrote:

Even things I do easily and naturally I cannot do once I order myself to do them with an express and prescribed command. The very parts of my body which have a degree of freedom and autonomy sometimes refuse to obey me if I plan to bind them to obligatory service at a certain time and place.15

What’s true of making love and going to sleep is also true of things less physical: for example, attempts to be natural, to love, to be wise, or to be innocent and self-unseeing, are self-defeating.16 The best things in life hide from the full glare of focussed attention. They refuse our will.

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14. Cf. Pascal: ‘Car il ne faut pas se méconnaître: nous sommes automates autant qu’esprit’ (1976, §252, Lafuma §821).

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15. Montaigne, ‘On presumption’, Essais, Bk. II:17 (1993, p. 738).

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16. See Leslie Farber (1976) and Jon Elster (1983, see p. 161 above) for further exploration of this paradox.

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It is, however, precisely the left hemisphere’s task to bring things into focus, to render the implicit explicit, in order that what is seen may become the object of our will. This is achieved by a certain kind of vision, since only vision, of all the human senses, can give truly detailed information, and give clear pinpointing in space, to guide our grasp. This clarity and fixity of the object is highly amenable to the world view of the left hemisphere: in fact it is only in the case of the left hemisphere, not of the right, that one can speak appropriately of a world ‘view’ at all. But sight alone of all the senses also allows finely discriminated depth. As long as that depth is preserved, it yields for the right-hemisphere engagement, ‘betweenness’. Shorn away, it allows precision-focussing by the left hemisphere, at a point in a two-dimensional plane (one is aware of this two dimensionality particularly when focussing a microscope or telescope). The resulting illusion is of clarity, the ability to know something ‘just as it is’, as though everything about it were revealed through clear vision.

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Depth is the sense of a something lying beyond. Another way of thinking of this would be more generally in terms of the ultimate importance of context. Context is that ‘something’ (in reality nothing less than a world) in which whatever is seen inheres, and in which its being lies, and in reference to which alone it can be understood, lying both beyond and around it. The problem with the ‘attentional spotlight’, as conventional psychological literature calls it, is that this isolates the object of attention from its context – not just its surroundings, but the depth in which it lives. It opacifies it. Our vision stops at ‘the thing itself’. The price is that this sheering away of the context produces something lifeless and mechanical. In a famous passage in the Meditations, Descartes speaks of looking from a window and seeing men pass in the street. ‘Yet’, he reflects, ‘do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons? I judge that they are men.’17 It is not surprising that, shorn by the philosophic stare of all context that might give them meaning, the coats and hats that Descartes sees from his window walking about in the street could be animated by a machine. They have become fully opaque; the observer no longer passes through them to see the living person beneath. He no longer sees what is implied. However, the attention of the right hemisphere, concerned as it is with the being in context, permits us to see through them to the reality that lies around and beyond them. It could not make the mistake of seeing the clothes and hats in isolation.

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17. Descartes, 1984–91b, ‘Meditation II’, p. 21 (emphasis in original).

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The illusion that, if we can see something clearly, we see it as it really is, is hugely seductive. Ruskin, in Modern Painters, makes the point that clarity is bought at the price of limitation: ‘We never see anything clearly … What we call seeing a thing clearly, is only seeing enough of it to make out what it is; this point of intelligibility varying in distance for different magnitudes and kinds of things …’ He gives the example of an open book and an embroidered handkerchief on a lawn. Viewed from a distance of a quarter of a mile, they are indistinguishable; from closer, we can see which is which, but not read the book or trace the embroidery on the handkerchief; as we go nearer, we ‘can now read the text and trace the embroidery, but cannot see the fibres of the paper, nor the threads of the stuff’; closer still and we can see the watermark and the threads, ‘but not the hills and dales in the paper’s surface, nor the fine fibres which shoot off from every thread’; until we take a microscope to it, and so on, ad infinitum. At which point do we see it clearly? ‘When, therefore, we say, we see the book clearly,’ Ruskin concludes, ‘we mean only that we know it is a book.’18 Clarity, it seems, describes not a degree of perception, but a type of knowledge. To know something clearly is to know it partially only, and to know it, rather than to experience it, in a certain way.

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18. Ruskin, 1904, vol. 4, Part V, ch. iv, §4, pp. 60–61 (emphasis in original).

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With the beginnings of modernity our experience itself becomes increasingly pictorial. As Heidegger writes: ‘The world picture does not change from an earlier one into a modern one, but rather the fact that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age.’19 This changes the nature of existence.

Where the world becomes picture … the world [is] conceived and grasped as picture. What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extent that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth.20

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19. Heidegger, 1977, p. 130.

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20. ibid., p. 129.

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Heidegger’s animus was directed particularly against the impact of Descartes, who had written that the ‘conduct of our life depends entirely on our senses’ and ‘sight is the noblest and most comprehensive’ of them.21 This is precisely because Descartes was concerned with vision as an instrument of clear, sharply defined knowledge of each thing in isolation – a project impossible to reconcile with understanding based on the implicit, context-bound nature of things as delivered by the right hemisphere, which the left hemisphere only subsequently ‘represents and sets forth’ as distinct items. It is not by chance that the word ‘distinct’ implies division.

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21. Descartes, 1984–91c,’Discourse I: Light’, p. 152.

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In order truly to see the thing as it is, attention needs to do something quite different. It needs both to rest on the object and pass through the plane of focus. Seeing the thing as it is depends on also seeing through it, to something beyond, the context, the ‘roundness’ or depth, in which it exists. If the detached, highly focussed attention of the left hemisphere is brought to bear on living things, and not later resolved into the whole picture by right-hemisphere attention, which yields depth and context, it is destructive. We become like insects, as Merleau-Ponty says. It is similar with works of art, which as I have said have more in common with people than things. Explicitness always forces this sheering away, this concentration on the surface, and the loss of transparency – or more correctly semi-transparency. It is the analogue of the joke explained, the metaphor laboriously restated. In such circumstances, the mechanism of the joke, of the metaphor, becomes opaque and obtrudes. Metaphoric meaning depends on this semi-transparency, this being-seen-and-not-being-seen. Kerényi writes of Homeric symbols, for example, that they can be ‘seen through’, as ‘the visible sign of an invisible order … not as an element of “symbolism”, but as a transparent part of the world.’ If they obtruded as symbols, they would need to be explicitly decoded, and that would rob them of all their power.22

Making things explicit is the equivalent of focussing on the workings, at the expense of the work, the medium at the expense of the message. Once opaque, the plane of attention is in the wrong place, as if we focussed on the mechanics of the play, not on the substance of the play itself; or on the plane of the canvas, not what is seen there.

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22. Kerényi, 1962, p. 115. Elsewhere he writes of the ritual nature of ‘the festal world of Homer’, which ‘rests on a special knowledge in the poet, a knowing which is a state of being exactly corresponding to the transparency of the world. The transparency of the world allows the divine figures of nature to shine through for the poet …’ (ibid., p. 144).

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Depth, as opposed to distance from a surface, never implies detachment. Depth brings us into a relationship, whatever the distance involved, with the other, and allows us to ‘feel across’ the intervening space. It situates us in the same world as the other. Thus, however distant the figures in a Claude painting, we feel drawn to them and their world; we are taken on a journey into the depth of space that surrounds them, as Hazlitt said. Diderot wrote a series of descriptions of seven walks he had taken with a certain Abbé for his companion through the most beautiful, wild scenery, and what they had seen and experienced there; only at the end does he reveal that these were imagined travels within the landscapes of Vernet’s paintings.23 What produces alienation is not depth, but lack of depth. Loss of depth forms an important feature of the Cartesian, objective view of the world, as if it were projected on the surface of the retina, or on the photographic plate. We are rebuffed by the two dimensionality of the plane that stands some distance from us, without depth, a two-dimensional world in which we can no longer stand alongside what becomes the ‘object’ of our vision. Depth is of great psychological significance, and it is relevant that in schizophrenia, which simulates an overactive left-hemisphere state, there is, as Louis Sass has shown, a perspectival slippage, a loss of grip on the frame of reference.24 Attention ceases to be paid to, say, the scene pictured on the paper, and is transferred to the plane of the paper itself. There is a loss of precisely the transparency that operates when we understand something in the normal way.

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23. Diderot, 1995, vol. 2, pp. 86–123.

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24. See p. 393 ff. below.

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25. Merleau-Ponty, 1964c, p. 164.

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A painting is not a thing in the world: nor is it just a representation of the world. In a marvellous phrase of Merleau-Ponty’s, we do not see paintings, as much as see according to them.25 They are, like people, and the forms of the natural world, neither just objective things, nor mere representations of things: they permit us to see through, and according to, themselves. They have a semi-opaque (or semi-transparent) quality, not disappearing altogether, in which case some reality or other would be seen in their place, a reality which they would no more than represent. No, they have reality of their own. But equally they are not mere things, existing ‘out there’ independent of us or whatever else it is that exists. We are aware of them but see through them, see the world according to them. To take the example of the Claude painting: we neither allow our eye simply to rest on the pure thing in front of us, a canvas measuring such and such, with so and so patches of blue, green and brown on it, nor do we see straight through it, as though ignorant that we are looking at a painting, and imagining we look through a window. Equally with poetry: language does often function as if it were transparent, when we are reading a piece of prose, and unaware of its facticity. But in poetry the language itself is present to us – semi-transparent, semi-opaque; not a thing, but a living something that allows us to move through it and beyond, though never allowing the language to disappear as though it played no part in the whatever it is beyond language that it yields to us.

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Drama, too, can be either completely absorbing or quite alienating, becoming a picture in which we do not participate. In order to absorb, the medium has to be translucent or transparent: we must not focus on the players – or the playwright (Shakespeare completely disappears in his work). That’s why bad acting can be so embarrassing. It draws our attention to the fact that the actors are acting, and to how they see themselves; they become like critics whose self-preening causes them to obtrude between us and what they claim to illuminate. The implicit becomes explicit and all is lost.

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PRIMACY OF AFFECT

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If the implicit grounds the explicit, it would imply that one’s feelings are not a reaction to, or a superposition on, one’s cognitive assessment, but the reverse: the affect comes first, the thinking later. Some fascinating research confirms that affective judgment is not dependent on the outcome of a cognitive process. We do not make choices about whether we like something on the basis of explicit assessment, a balance sheet, weighing up its parts. We make an intuitive assessment of the whole before any cognitive processes come into play, though they will, no doubt, later be used to ‘explain’, and justify, our choice. This has been called ‘the primacy of affect’.26 We make an assessment of the whole at once, and pieces of information about specific aspects are judged in the light of the whole, rather than the other way round (though these pieces of information, if there are enough that do not cohere with our idea of the whole, can ultimately cause a shift in our sense of the whole).27 The implication is that our affective judgment and our sense of the whole, dependent on the right hemisphere, occur before cognitive assessment of the parts, the contribution of the left hemisphere. ‘I would anticipate that … at some deep and fundamental affective level, the right hemisphere is more in touch with true inner feelings and less able to lie.’28 Panksepp’s suspicion would be supported by the research evidence discussed in Chapter 2. While affect is not of course the same as value, like value it is primary, not just derived from cognitive assessment, as the left hemisphere would have us believe when it retrospectively examines the process; and it was this insight that lay behind Max Scheler’s important concept of Wertnehmung, pre-cognitive apprehension of the value of something, its meaning for ‘me’.29

1038

26. R. B. Zajonc, 1980; Zajonc, Pietromonaco & Bargh, 1982; and R. B. Zajonc, 1984. Also see Jaak Panksepp: ‘to the best of our knowledge, the affective essence of emotion is subcortically and precognitively organised’ (1998, p. 26) and ‘the normal flow of motivational events in the brain’ is one in which ‘emotions and regulatory feelings have stronger effects on cognitions than the other way round’ (ibid., p. 166).

1038

27. See pp. 159–60 above.

1038

28. Panksepp, 1998, p. 334.

384

The disposition towards the world comes first: any cognitions are subsequent to and consequent on that disposition, which is in other words ‘affect’.30 Affect may too readily be equated with emotion. Emotions are certainly part of affect, but are only part of it. Something much broader is implied: a way of attending to the world (or not attending to it), a way of relating to the world (or not relating to it), a stance, a disposition, towards the world – ultimately a ‘way of being’ in the world.

1040

30. ‘Behind every thought there is an affective-volitional tendency, which holds the answer to the last “why” in the analysis of thinking’: Vygotsky, 1986, p. 252.

384

But emotion is very important, and it too is closer to the core of our being than cognition. As Nietzsche wrote, ‘thoughts are the shadows of our feelings—always darker, emptier, simpler’.31 Several lines of reasoning from the evidence converge to suggest that the essential core of being is subcortical.32 Perceptual–cognitive awareness would appear to have developed on the back of affective awareness, which was a ‘revolutionary prerequisite’, writes Jaak Panksepp: ‘From such a vantage, Descartes’ faith in his assertion “I think, therefore I am” may be superseded by a more primitive affirmation that is part of the genetic makeup of all mammals: “I feel, therefore I am.” ‘33 He later goes on in a footnote: ‘the bottom-line statement probably should be “I am, therefore I am.”‘34

1040

31. Nietzsche, 2001, III, §179, p. 137 (emphasis added).

1040

32. Panksepp, 1998, p. 308.

1040

33. ibid., p. 309.

1040

34. ibid., p. 420, n. 34. To which I can only add that that, too, is grounded on the ultimate declaration of being, once made by the Judaeo-Christian Yahweh, though it might as well have been Heidegger’s Sein, if Sein were to be more forthcoming about itself: ‘I AM THAT I AM’.

385

Emotion and the body are at the irreducible core of experience: they are not there merely to help out with cognition. Feeling is not just an add-on, a flavoured coating for thought: it is at the heart of our being, and reason emanates from that central core of the emotions, in an attempt to limit and direct them, rather than the other way about. Feeling came, and comes, first, and reason emerged from it: ‘emotion has taught mankind to reason’, as the eighteenth-century French philosopher Vauvenargues put it.35 Even the prejudice we have in favour of reason cannot itself be justified by reasoning: the virtues of reason are something we can do no more than intuit. In his influential book Descartes’ Error, Damasio points to the primacy of emotion in neurological terms, when he notes that

the apparatus of rationality, traditionally presumed to be neocortical, does not seem to work without that of biological regulation, traditionally presumed to be subcortical. Nature appears to have built the apparatus of rationality not just on top of the apparatus of biological regulation, but also from it and with it.36

1040

35. ‘Les passions ont appris aux hommes la raison’: Vauvenargues, 1859, §154, p. 389.

1040

36. A. R. Damasio, 1994a, p. 128.

1040

37. ibid., p. 130. Cf. ibid., p. xiii: ‘at their best, feelings point us in the proper direction, take us to the appropriate place in a decision-making space, where we have to make a moral judgment’.

386

This observation brings me back to the point I made in Chapter 1, that the structure of the brain gives its history, and helps, partly because of that very fact, towards an understanding of the mind. Nonetheless Damasio does not appear to recognise the phenomenological primacy of emotion or affect: instead he sees emotion as auxiliary, there to play a role in guiding the thinking being that we are, rather than seeing thinking as there to guide the feeling being that we are. ‘Emotions’, he insists, ‘are not a luxury’, as though such an idea could ever have occurred to anyone in the light of experience, let alone of the acknowledged primacy of affect. Emotions are not a luxury, Damasio goes on to reassure us, because they are useful tools: ‘they play a role in communicating meaning to others, and they may also play the cognitive guidance role that I propose …’37 Thus emotions are there to serve as handmaiden to reason, playing a useful role in helping us communicate, or possibly in weighing the products of cognition, but not at the irreducible core of the experience of ourselves.

387

In the process of trying to rehabilitate feelings by showing that they form, after all, a vital part of the cognitive process, Damasio inevitably does so by trying to make them explicit, measurable, quantitative – turning them into speed or an amount of mental associative processes, speed or an amount of motor behaviours – rather than qualitative. He also sees them, as William James did, as an interpretation of bodily ‘data’: in fact he even states that ‘regular feeling comes from a “readout” of the body changes’.38 The inseparability of the body and emotion (not to mention affect) is interpreted in such a way that emotion ends up derived from the body by a ‘readout’, there to guide the cognition that is doing the reading. Apparently unaware that he is repeating Descartes’ error,39 he writes: ‘I conceptualise the essence of feelings as something you and I can see through a window that opens directly onto a continuously updated image of the structure and state of our body …’40 Once you are able to ‘see’ your feelings ‘through a window’ opening onto an ‘image’ of your body, you have clearly far outstripped Descartes at his own game.

1040

38. ibid., p. 157.

1040

39. For problems associated with seeing oneself, let alone seeing one’s own feelings, never mind ‘through a window’, see especially Chapters 6, 8 & 14 of the current work. For further discussion of Damasio, see my review of Descartes’ Error in Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, 1996, 1(2), pp. 171–9; from his reactions to which I would not anticipate immediate assent from Damasio in what I have to say here, or anywhere else.

1040

40. A. R. Damasio, 1994a, p. xiv. As Panksepp points out (1998, p. 341), ‘animals with essentially no neocortex remain behaviourally, and probably internally, as emotional as ever, indeed more so’. See also: Panksepp, Normansell, Cox et al., 1994.

388

I think part of the difficulty here, which I will return to throughout this book, is that in the context of intellectual discourse we are always obliged to ‘look at’ the relationship of cognition to affect from the cognitive point of view. Quite what it would mean to treat it from the point of view of affect is less easily said, not easily even imagined: there is no question about it, if we want to know about this relationship, rather than be satisfied with intuition, then we are obliged to treat cognition as the path to knowledge. Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking an astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world whether, in his opinion, the sun moved round the earth or the earth round the sun. To ask the question alone would be enough to label one as mad. But notice what the metaphor reveals: for in time the observation of tiny discrepancies in the model became significant enough to cause a bouleversement of the entire known universe. And so cognition eventually did find its own path to its kind of truth: the primacy of affect.

389

Some now famous experimental work by Benjamin Libet, published in 1985, attempted to investigate the conscious will from a neurophysiological point of view. Libet asked subjects to make spontaneous movements of their fingers at will, and recorded what was going on in the brain by monitoring the accompanying electroencephalographic data, recorded by electrodes on the scalp.41 He confirmed earlier findings of a German neurologist, Hans Kornhuber, who had shown that there is a blip in the trace, known as a ‘readiness potential’ (Bereitschaftspotential), about a second before the movement takes place.42 But, much to his amazement, he discovered that the conscious urge to move the finger occurred, not before, but approximately 0.2 seconds after, the readiness potential. In other words the brain seemed to know in advance that its ‘owner’ was going to make a decision to carry out an action.

1040

41. Libet, 1985 (with open peer commentary, pp. 539–58; and Libet’s reply, ‘Theory and evidence relating cerebral processes to conscious will’, pp. 558–66).

1040

42. Kornhuber & Deecke, 1965.

389

This clearly doesn’t square with the common-sense notion that we make a conscious decision to do something, and has cast doubt in some minds on free will, giving rise to an extensive philosophical literature of debate. As Susan Pockett puts it, some of Libet’s research results ‘seem to deny to consciousness any major role in the conduct of our day-to-day affairs’.43 Quite so. But as one of the contributors to this debate points out, this is only a problem if one imagines that, for me to decide something, I have to have willed it with the conscious part of my mind.44 Perhaps my unconscious is every bit as much ‘me’. In fact it had better be, because so little of life is conscious at all.

1040

43. Pockett, 2002, p. 144.

1040

44. ‘Libet’s results seems to be in tension with our commonsense picture only because they suggest positing volitions that initially are not conscious’: Rosenthal, 2002, p. 219.

390

One would have thought that such a conclusion would not be hard to embrace in a post-Freudian era. It certainly would not surprise those who have read the now classic work of Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, in which he systematically disabuses the reader of the idea that consciousness is needed for any of the defining features of human mental life.45 He points out that very little brain activity is in fact conscious (current estimates are certainly less than 5 per cent, and probably less than 1 per cent), and that we take decisions, solve problems, make judgments, discriminate, reason, and so on, without any need for conscious involvement.

1041

45. Jaynes, 1976. Lakoff & Johnson (1999) make the same point about the low levels of conscious activity needed for most mental life, however sophisticated (p. 13).

391

Before saying more about the conscious and unconscious mind, it would be helpful to clarify the terms. Adam Zeman is admirably concise in doing so.46 He distinguishes three principal meanings of the term consciousness: (1) consciousness as waking state: ‘after a lucid interval, the injured soldier lapsed into unconsciousness’; (2) consciousness as experience: ‘I became conscious of a feeling of dread, and an overpowering smell of burning rubber’; (3) consciousness as mind: ‘I am conscious that I may be straining your patience’ – in which case, unlike the previous example, one is not reporting on experience as such, but on something one bears in awareness even if not actually thinking about it and experiencing the consequences of such a thought at the time. Consciousness in each of these senses is sustainable by either hemisphere in isolation, though the quality of that consciousness might differ. The major difference between the hemispheres lies in their relationship with the unconscious mind, whether that means the dream state (thinking of consciousness in the first sense), or what we experience or bear in mind without being aware of it (the second and third senses). Whatever does not lie in the centre of the attentional field, where we are focussed, is better yielded by the right hemisphere, and the left hemisphere can sometimes show surprising ignorance of it.

1041

46. Zeman, 2001.

392

Jaynes aligns the right hemisphere with the unconscious mind, and this link has been made by many others.47 The alignment has to be a matter of degree rather than all or nothing. As one writer puts it, ‘the left side is involved with conscious response and the right with the unconscious mind’.48 It is true that processing of pre-conscious information, which includes most of what is encompassed in social understanding, tends to be carried out by the right hemisphere.49 The attentional system that detects stimuli outside the focus of conscious processing, is ‘strongly lateralised to the right hemisphere’.50 Equally, conscious processing tends to go on in the left hemisphere. This dichotomy can be seen at play even in a realm, such as emotion, with an admittedly strong right-hemisphere bias: the right hemisphere processes unconscious emotional material, whereas the left hemisphere is involved in the conscious processing of emotional stimuli.51 Certainly the right hemisphere experiences material that the left hemisphere cannot be aware of; 52 and according to Allan Schore, Freud’s pre-conscious lies in the right orbitofrontal cortex.53 Freud wrote of non-verbal, imagistic thinking that it ‘is, therefore, only a very incomplete form of becoming conscious. In some way, too, it stands nearer to unconscious processes than does thinking in words, and it is unquestionably older than the latter both ontogenetically and phylogenetically.’54 Freud may in fact have derived his distinction between the secondary (conscious) process and the primary (unconscious) process from Hughlings Jackson’s distinction between the verbal, propositional thought of the left hemisphere and the speechless, ‘lower levels of ideation’ associated with the right hemisphere.55 All of this is perhaps in keeping with evidence suggesting that during REM sleep and dreaming there is greatly increased blood flow in the right hemisphere, particularly the temporoparietal region.56 EEG coherence data also point to the predominance of the right hemisphere in dreaming.57

1041

47. See Joseph, 1992.

1041

48. Mlot, 1998 (emphasis added).

1041

49. Barchas & Perlaki, 1986.

1041

50. Corbetta & Shulman, 2002, p. 208.

1041

51. Wexler, Warrenburg, Schwartz et al., 1992.

1041

52. Galin, 1974; Joseph, 1992.

1041

53. Schore, 2003.

1041

54. Freud, 1960d, p. 14.

1041

55. Fullinwider, 1983, p. 158.

1041

56. Meyer, Ishikawa, Hata et al., 1987. See also Gabel, 1988; and Ramachandran & Rogers-Ramachandran, 1996, which demonstrates that stimulation of the right hemisphere can cause an increase in REM sleep.

1041

57. Bolduc, Daoust, Limoges et al., 2003; Goldstein, Stoltzfus & Gardocki, 1972.

393

If what we mean by consciousness is the part of the mind that brings the world into focus, makes it explicit, allows it to be formulated in language, and is aware of its own awareness, it is reasonable to link the conscious mind to activity almost all of which lies ultimately in the left hemisphere. One could think of such consciousness as a tree growing on one side of a fence, but with a root system that goes deep down into the ground on both sides of the fence. This type of consciousness is a minute part of brain activity, and must take place at the highest level of integration of brain function, at the point where the left hemisphere (which in reality is in constant communication with the right hemisphere, at the millisecond level) acts as Gazzaniga’s ‘interpreter’.58 Not the only one that does the experiencing, mind you, but the one that does the interpreting, the translation into words. (Note the significance of the metaphor. Meaning does not originate with an interpreter – all one can hope for from the interpreter is that in his or her hands the true meaning is not actually lost.)

393

Why should ‘we’ not be our unconscious, as well as our conscious, selves? Libet’s experiment does not tell us that we do not choose to initiate an action: it just tells us that we have to widen our concept of who ‘we’ are to include our unconscious selves. The difficulties seem to arise, as so often, because of language, which is principally the left hemisphere’s way of construing the world. It will be objected that what we mean by words such as ‘will’, ‘intend’, ‘choose’ is that the process is conscious: if it’s not conscious, then we did not will it to happen, we did not intend it, it was not our choice. The fact that it is clear to all of us these days that our unconscious wishes, intentions, choices can play a huge part in our lives seems not to be noticed.

394

If forced to concede this point, the next line of defence is to disown the unconscious, just as in split-brain patients the left hemisphere will disown the actions that are obviously initiated (‘chosen’, ‘intended’, ‘willed’) by the right hemisphere: it was not ‘my’ will. One does not in fact have to look at split-brain patients to see that the right hemisphere has a will, can intend, mean, will and choose, just as the left hemisphere can. As Hans Vaihinger wrote:

the organic function of thought is carried on for the most part unconsciously. Should the product finally enter consciousness also, or should consciousness momentarily accompany the processes of logical thought, this light only penetrates to the shallows, and the actual fundamental processes are carried on in the darkness of the unconscious. The specifically purposeful operations are chiefly, and in any case at the beginning, wholly instinctive and unconscious, even if they later press forward into the luminous circle of consciousness …59

1042

59. Vaihinger, 1935, p. 7.

394

I want to present some amazing research findings that I hope will confirm not only that this is so, but that, once again, these intentions arise from the right hemisphere and are prior, in every sense – temporally, logically and ontologically – to those of the left hemisphere.

395

The findings in question come from the study of gesture, in itself a sort of language with a subtlety and immediacy that goes beyond the explicitness of words: ‘We respond to gestures with an extreme alertness and, one might almost say, in accordance with an elaborate and secret code that is written nowhere, known by none, and understood by all.’60 There is, incidentally, a hemispheric distinction between expressive gestures, which embody inner emotional states, and instrumental gestures, designed to influence the immediate behaviour of another. As we might expect, expressive gestures activate the right hemisphere, in the region of the superior temporal sulcus, while instrumental ones activate a left-lateralised system associated with language and motor imitation.61

1042

60. Sapir, 1927.

1042

61. Gallagher & Frith, 2004.

395

But the importance of gesture is that it gives an insight into the genesis of thought. David McNeill has for years painstakingly videotaped human interactions and analysed the relationship between gesture language and what is spoken. The focus of his work is not on hemisphere difference as such, but along the way he lets drop some observations that are pure gold to those who are interested in the topic.62

1043

62. McNeill, 1992.

395

The first point of interest to ourselves is that gestures slightly anticipate speech:

The anticipation of speech by gesture is important evidence for the argument that gestures reveal utterances in their primitive form: there is a global-synthetic image taking form at the moment the preparation phase begins, but there is not yet a linguistic structure with which it can integrate.63

It will be clear that ‘global-synthetic’ is a description of the holistic or Gestalt nature of thought associated with the right hemisphere. McNeill refers, by contrast, to the ‘linear-segmented’ nature of verbal utterance – linearity and segmentation being features of the analytic nature of thought in the left hemisphere. So it would appear that the first manifestation of thought is in the ‘global-synthetic’ form generated by the right hemisphere. Yet the actual stroke phase of the gesture – its expressive part – appears to be deliberately delayed so that it is synchronised with the act of speech, once the left hemisphere has got there, and the two modes of thought have combined.64

1043

63. ibid., p. 25. Later work by McNeill confirms that ‘the onset of a gesture movement … often precedes and never [emphasis in original] follows the semantically related speech’ (McNeill, 2000, p. 326, n. 6). See also Kendon, 1972, 1980; Morrel-Samuels & Krauss, 1992; and Nobe, 2000.

396

McNeill reviews evidence for the main hypotheses about the relationship between gesture and speech, and concludes that there is a synthesis of two ‘opposite modes of thought’. One is expressed in gesture, and is ‘global-synthetic all the way down’: it is constructed at the moment of speaking, and is idiosyncratic in nature, rather than forming a systematic code – all features that identify it as right-hemisphere-derived. The other is expressed in words, having ‘a linear-segmented hierarchical linguistic structure,’65 features which identify it as derived from the left hemisphere. But he emphasises that it is the right-hemisphere contribution that has both temporal priority and ontological priority, since thought is originally ‘largely imagistic and minimally analytic’, whereas by the moment of utterance, it has become ‘both imagistic and analytic and is a synthesis of the holistic and analytic functions.’66 In terms of the thesis of this book, then, the process begins in the realm of the right hemisphere, gets input from the left hemisphere, and finally reaches a synthesis of right with left.

1043

64. McNeill, 1992, p. 26.

1043

65. ibid., pp. 35 & 245.

1043

66. ibid., p. 248.

397

‘Gestures do not merely reflect thought’, writes McNeill, ‘but help constitute thought … Without them thought would be altered or incomplete.’67 This is reminiscent of Max Black’s insistence that paraphrase of metaphor produces ‘a loss of cognitive content’; it is not just that literal paraphrase ‘may be tiresomely prolix or boringly explicit (or deficient in qualities of style); it fails to be a translation because it fails to give the insight that the metaphor did.’68 Almost all gestures accompany speech,69 and though most are made by the right hand70 – since speech and gesture are so closely combined in and near Broca’s area – the metaphoric nature of gesture language, in fact, comes from the right hemisphere, and has to be routed across to the left hemisphere for execution. We can see this in split-brain patients, whose gesture pattern from the right hand (reflecting the disconnected left hemisphere) is abstract and impoverished in the extreme, but becomes rich again when it comes from the left hand (reflecting the disconnected right hemisphere). Fascinatingly, though, this now interferes with fluency of speech, since the global-synthetic form of what one wants to say, expressed with fluency immediately by the left hand, cannot, as it normally would, be transferred across the corpus callosum to become available to the left hemisphere for speech71 – further evidence, if such were needed, that the richness of thought comes from the right hemisphere and is transferred across to the left hemisphere secondarily for translation into language. Gazzaniga’s image of the ‘interpreter’ again, perhaps more apt than even he realized.

1043

67. ibid., p. 245; and see p. 259 for elaboration of this.

1043

68. Black, 1962, p. 46.

1043

69. McNeill, 1992, p. 23.

1043

70. ibid., p. 331; but not so according to Miller & Franz, who found that the majority are synchronised bimanual gestures, and the minority that are one-handed are evenly divided between the hands (Miller & Franz, 2005).

1043

71. McNeill, 1992, p. 343 ff.

398

McNeill unearths further evidence of the link between the gestural language that has primacy and its right-hemisphere origins. ‘After right-hemisphere damage, speakers show tendencies both to decontextualise speech and to reduce gesture output;’72 and those who do not make gestures tend to give more ‘segmented’ sequences of information than global descriptions.73 As mentioned, restricting hand movement limits the content and fluency of speech,74 and we can now see that this is probably because it inhibits expression of the primary global-synthetic concept of what one wants to say, originating in the right hemisphere.

1043

72. McNeill, 2000, p. 326, n. 7 (emphasis added).

1043

73. Miller & Franz, 2005; Iverson, 1999.

1043

74. Rauscher, Krauss & Chen, 1996; Rimé, Schiaratura, Hupet et al., 1984.

398

Perhaps the most striking finding of all is that, when there is a mismatch between gesture and speech, it is the gesture that carries the day in 100 per cent of cases. ‘In all cases, the affecting element in the stimulus appeared to be the gesture, and it was never the speech.’75 Where a mathematical speaker made a mistake verbally, his gesture proceeded with the metaphorical meaning correctly, implying that the thought was correct even if the language wasn’t, and the gesture conveyed the thought.76

1043

75. McNeill, 1992, p. 137.

1043

76. ibid., pp. 167 & 269.

398

McNeill also found that the disconnected left hemisphere could not engage with narrative, for two main reasons: it lacked concreteness and specificity in its relation of the story, and became abstract and generic; and it got time sequences wrong and conflated episodes that were separate in the story because they looked similar (in other words, it categorised them, and therefore put them together, even though in the lived world their meaning was destroyed by being taken out of narrative sequence). In place of a narrative, it produced a highly abstract and disjointed meta-narrative.77 Narrative forms of thought are associated with the right hemisphere;78 they are associated with self–other interactions and are heavily affectively charged – and they arise earlier than ‘paradigmatic’ forms.79

1043

77. ibid., pp. 345–52.

1043

78. EEG activity over the right hemisphere predominates in reading stories and over the left hemisphere in reading a scientific textbook: Ornstein, Herron, Johnstone et al., 1979. And see Vitz, 1990.

1043

79. J. Bruner, 1986.

399

Overall McNeill’s evidence supports strongly the other arguments that thought, meaning and the urge to communication come first from the relatively unconscious realm of the right hemisphere. If the historical hypothesis that music led to language is correct, then this is yet further demonstration of the primacy of the right hemisphere way of being.80

1043

80. One nice detail of embryology is that the right cerebral hemisphere develops gyral complexity earlier than the left: see, e.g., Chi, Dooling & Gilles, 1977a.

399

RE-PRESENTATION WAITS ON PRESENTATION

399

The evidence from McNeill’s work is that – temporally, logically and ontologically – the right-hemisphere world grounds that of the left. It forms an illuminating companion, in my view, to Libet’s work on the will. In both cases the conscious left hemisphere believes that it is an originator, whereas in fact it is a receiver of something that comes to it from elsewhere.

399

Similarly I would say that the conscious left hemisphere thinks that it is in control, directing its gaze where it wants, bringing the world into being as it squints here and there as it pleases, while the reality is that it is selecting from a broader world that has already been brought into being for it by the right hemisphere – and often it is not even doing that, since, far more than it realizes, its choices have already been made for it.

400

This has to be the case since the business of re-presentation has to wait on the phenomenon of presentation. Turning to the neurological and neuropsychological literature again, we can see what happens when the contribution of the right hemisphere to the world is absent. The world loses reality. People who have lost significant right-hemisphere function experience a world from which meaning has been drained, where vitality appears attenuated, and where things themselves seem insubstantial, to lack corporeal solidity. Because of the sense of detachment, such people can begin to doubt the actuality of what they see, wondering if it is in fact all ‘play-acting’, a pretence, unreal. They can come to think that the hospital, with its doctors and nurses, is an elaborate charade put on for their benefit. This is similar to the delusional misidentification syndromes of Capgras and Fregoli referred to earlier, in which familiar people, things or places are felt to be replaced by copies, or impostors – syndromes which are also associated with right hemisphere deficits. Vié, in a series of papers in 1944, reported some remarkable examples of various kinds of misidentification, including two separate cases of French soldiers who, invalided out of the First World War, maintained that it was all – soldiers, trenches, bombs and all – a theatrical performance.81 The left-hemisphere world is, after all, virtual – not present, but a representation. In schizophrenia this can easily slip over into a feeling of menace, in which there seems to be something being ‘put on’ or pretended which is being ‘kept from’ the individual; the alienation leads to paranoia, coupled with a sort of anxious boredom or ‘ennui’. Others exhibit an almost fatuous lack of concern. Interestingly right-hemisphere-damaged individuals may see their own bodies as alien, as mechanical, an assemblage of parts, or a mere thing in the world like other things, rather than an integral aspect of ourselves that we live, not just live in. An inappropriate sense of detachment, alienation, and estrangement from the self and the world are all characteristic consequences of right-sided, usually temporoparietal, lesions.82 This condition is similar to aspects of schizophrenia, and it is probable that much of the phenomenology of the acute phase of schizophrenia arises from the fact that important aspects of right-hemisphere function are distorted or attenuated.

401

Thus it is the right hemisphere that permits a living world to come into being, and it is from this that the re-presented world of the left hemisphere is derived. The difference between the two, what is present and what is represented, is illustrated beautifully by the different concepts of truth that they hold.83 How would you get an idea of that? Take the following example of a syllogism with a false premise:

Major premise: all monkeys climb trees;

Minor premise: the porcupine is a monkey;

Implied conclusion: the porcupine climbs trees.

401

Well – does it? As Deglin and Kinsbourne demonstrated, each hemisphere has its own way of approaching this question. At the outset of their experiment, when the intact individual is asked ‘Does the porcupine climb trees?’, she replies (using, of course, both hemispheres): ‘It does not climb, the porcupine runs on the ground; it’s prickly, it’s not a monkey.’ (Annoyingly, there are in fact porcupines that do climb trees, but it seems that the Russian subjects, and their investigators, were unaware of this, and therefore for the purposes of the experiment it must be assumed that porcupines are not arboreal.) During experimental temporary hemisphere inactivations, the left hemisphere of the very same individual (with the right hemisphere inactivated) replies that the conclusion is true: ‘the porcupine climbs trees since it is a monkey.’ When the experimenter asks, ‘But is the porcupine a monkey?’, she replies that she knows it is not. When the syllogism is presented again, however, she is a little nonplussed, but replies in the affirmative, since ‘That’s what is written on the card.’ When the right hemisphere of the same individual (with the left hemisphere inactivated) is asked if the syllogism is true, she replies: ‘How can it climb trees – it’s not a monkey, it’s wrong here!’ If the experimenter points out that the conclusion must follow from the premises stated, she replies indignantly: ‘But the porcupine is not a monkey!’

In repeated situations, in subject after subject, when syllogisms with false premises, such as ‘All trees sink in water; balsa is a tree; balsa wood sinks in water’, or ‘Northern lights are often seen in Africa; Uganda is in Africa; Northern lights are seen in Uganda’, are presented, the same pattern emerges. When asked if the conclusion is true, the intact individual displays a common sense reaction: ‘I agree it seems to suggest so, but I know in fact it’s wrong.’ The right hemisphere dismisses the false premises and deductions as absurd. But the left hemisphere sticks to the false conclusion, replying calmly to the effect

402

In the left-hemisphere situation, it prioritises the system, regardless of experience: it stays within the system of signs. Truth, for it, is coherence, because for it there is no world beyond, no Other, nothing outside the mind, to correspond with. ‘That’s what it says here.’ So it corresponds with itself: in other words, it coheres. The right hemisphere prioritises what it learns from experience: the real state of existing things ‘out there’. For the right hemisphere, truth is not mere coherence, but correspondence with something other than itself. Truth, for it, is understood in the sense of being ‘true’ to something, faithfulness to whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves.

403

However, it would be wrong to deduce from this that the right hemisphere just goes with what is familiar, adopting a comfortable conformity with experience to date. After all, one’s experience to date might be untrue to the reality: then paying attention to logic would be an important way of moving away from false customary assumption. And I have emphasised that it is the right hemisphere that helps us to get beyond the inauthentically familiar. The design of the above experiment specifically tests what happens when one is forced to choose between two paths to the truth in answering a question: using what one knows from experience or following a syllogism where the premises are blatantly false. The question was not whether the syllogism was structurally correct, but what actually was true. But in a different situation, where one is asked the different question ‘Is this syllogism structurally correct?’, even when the conclusion flies in the face of one’s experience, it is the right hemisphere which gets the answer correct, and the left hemisphere which is distracted by the familiarity of what it already thinks it knows, and gets the answer wrong.84 The common thread here is the role of the right hemisphere as ‘bullshit detector’. In the first case (answering the question ‘What is true here?’) detecting the bullshit involves using common sense. In the second case (answering ‘Is the logic here correct?’), detecting the bullshit involves resisting the obvious, the usual train of thought. This illustrates the aspect of the right hemisphere’s activity which Ramachandran refers to as the ‘devil’s advocate’.85

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84. Goel & Dolan, 2003.

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83. Deglin & Kinsbourne, 1996. Inactivation of either hemisphere was the result of the administration of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) to that hemisphere: ECT has been shown to be a reliable method of hemisphere inactivation, producing predictable neurological signs indicative of inactivation of the treated hemisphere for a period of 30–40 minutes following treatment (see, e.g., Kriss, Blumhardt, Halliday et al., 1978).

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85. See p. 41 above.

403

THE FUNCTIONING OF THE NERVOUS SYSTEM IS RIGHT-HEMISPHERE CONGRUENT

404

One further line of evidence merits consideration. I have suggested that the function and structure of the brain act as a metaphor of mind: in other words, that we can learn something about the nature of mental processes by observing the brain. At the same time I have suggested that there is something more fundamental about the world that is brought into being by the right hemisphere, with its betweenness, its mode of knowing which involves reciprocation, a reverberative process, back and forth, compared with the linear, sequential, unidirectional method of building up a picture favoured by the left hemisphere. But surely, it may be said, the nervous system isn’t itself like the right hemisphere model. One nerve transmits an impulse to the next, which transmits it in turn to another, or to a muscle fibre, and eventually that results in action. The process is linear, sequential: what’s ‘reverberative’ about that? Surely if neurones themselves work in this linear, sequential, unidirectional way – whatever may happen later on in the handling of this ‘information’ – then the left hemisphere model is fundamental to our being, to our mental processes and therefore to consciousness itself.

Well, as it happens, the way in which neurones behave is not linear, sequential, unidirectional: they behave in a reciprocal, reverberative fashion, and not just in the right hemisphere. Here is Marcel Kinsbourne:

Counter to the traditional image of the brain as a unidirectional information thoroughfare, when cell stations in the brain connect, the traffic is almost always bi-directional. The traffic is not in one direction, with a little feedback, either. Areas interact equally in both directions, directly reciprocally, or indirectly by looping across several cell stations, so that the neural traffic reverberates through its starting point. The forebrain is overwhelmingly an arena of reverberating reciprocal influence.86

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86. Kinsbourne, 2003.

405

It seems that this reciprocity, this betweenness, goes to the core of our being. Further than even this, there is fascinating evidence that betweenness and reciprocity exist at the level of cell structure and function within the single neurone, even at the molecular level, as the brain comes to understand something and lay down memory traces.87 Whether it goes on at the atomic and subatomic levels I do not know, but my layman’s reading of such literature suggests that it may well do so.

The process of bringing the world into being begins, then, with the right hemisphere. And, as I mentioned in Chapter 2, it is the right hemisphere which develops its functions first, and which remains dominant through at least the first year of life.88

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See Rao, Pintchovski, Chin et al., 2006.

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88. See above, p. 88; also Decety & Chaminade, 2003.

405

THE INTERMEDIATE PROCESSING CARRIED OUT BY THE LEFT HEMISPHERE

405

Primacy could just mean coming first, in the sense that childhood comes before maturity. But I do not mean only that the right hemisphere starts the process of bringing the world into being. I mean that it does so because it is more in touch with reality, and that it has not just temporal or developmental priority, but ontological supremacy. Whatever the left hemisphere may add – and it adds enormously much – it needs to return what it sees to the world that is grounded by the right hemisphere.

406

Now we come to the world of the left hemisphere, a virtual world, but one where we are no longer patient recipients, but powerful operators. The values of clarity and fixity are added by the processing of the left hemisphere, which is what makes it possible for us to control, manipulate or use the world. For this, attention is directed and focussed; the wholeness is broken into parts; the implicit is unpacked; language becomes the instrument of serial analysis; things are categorised and become familiar. Affect is set aside, and superseded by cognitive abstraction; the conscious mind is brought to bear on the situation; thoughts are sent to the left hemisphere for expression in words and the metaphors are temporally lost or suspended; the world is re-presented in a now static and hierarchically organised form. This enables us to have knowledge, to bring the world into resolution, but it leaves what it knows denatured and decontextualised.

406

This is the world that is familiar to us from the intermediate, or ‘classical’ period of philosophy, from Plato at least until Kant, once the insights of the pre-Socratic philosophers were lost and before those of the German ‘idealists’, and later the phenomenologists, were gained. In physics it is that of classical mechanics, the Newtonian universe, and more broadly that vision of nature that began with Democritus and his contemporaries and came to an end with Niels Bohr and his.

406

The left hemisphere, the mediator of division, is never an endpoint, always a staging post. It is a useful department to send things to for processing, but the things only have meaning once again when they are returned to the right hemisphere.

There needs to be a process of reintegration, whereby we return to the experiential world again. The parts, once seen, are subsumed again in the whole, as the musician’s painful, conscious, fragmentation of the piece in practice is lost once again in the (now improved) performance. The part that has been under the spotlight is seen as part of a broader picture; what had to be conscious for a while becomes unconscious again; what needs to be implicit once again retires; the represented entity becomes once more present, and ‘lives’; and even language is given its final meaning by the right hemisphere’s holistic pragmatics.

407

So what begins in the right hemisphere’s world is ‘sent’ to the left hemisphere’s world for processing, but must be ‘returned’ to the world of the right hemisphere where a new synthesis can be made. Perhaps an analogy would be the relationship between reading and living. Life can certainly have meaning without books, but books cannot have meaning without life. Most of us probably share a belief that life is greatly enriched by them: life goes into books and books go back into life. But the relationship is not equal or symmetrical. Nonetheless what is in them not only adds to life, but genuinely goes back into life and transforms it, so that life as we live it in a world full of books is created partly by books themselves.

408

This metaphor is not perfect, but it makes the point. In one sense a book, like the world according to the left hemisphere, is a selective, organised, re-presented, static, revisitable, boundaried, ‘frozen’ extract of life. It has taken something infinitely complex, endlessly interrelated, fluent, evolving, uncertain, never to be repeated, embodied and fleeting (because alive) and produced something in a way very different that we can use to understand it. Though obviously far less complex than life itself, it has nonetheless brought into being an aspect of life that was not there before it. So the left hemisphere (like the book), can be seen as taking from the world as delivered by the right hemisphere (unconsidered ‘life’), and giving life back enhanced. But, on the shelf, the contents of the book are dead: they come back to life only in the process of being read. No longer static, boundaried, ‘frozen’, the contents of the book are taken up into the world where nothing is ever fixed or fully known, but always becoming something else.

409

I take it that there is something that exists outside the mind. One has to have a starting point, and if you do not believe at least that, I have nothing to say, not least because, if you are right, you are not there for me to say it to. The relationship of our brains to that something whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves could be of four kinds: (1) no relationship at all – which returns us to solipsism, since my brain would be the sole source of everything I experienced; (2) receptive – in the sense that, perhaps like a radio set, the brain picked up at least something of whatever it was from out there, and that became what is experienced; (3) generative – in the sense that the brain created at least something of the whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves; or (4) reverberative, that is to say, both receptive and generative – both picking up, receiving, perceiving, and in the process making, giving back, creating ‘whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves but includes ourselves’. I am simply going to state at this point that I adopt the last of these alternatives. Of course, which is right is a terribly important question for philosophy, but if such a thing is susceptible of proof, I can’t prove it. All I can say is that all the evidence available to me as a living, thinking, experiencing human being leads me to that conclusion.

410

So, given the argument of this book, is it both the hemispheres that are doing this giving and receiving and becoming part of it all out there – or just one? My view is that both the right and left hemispheres are involved in the giving and receiving process out of which the world we experience is created, but, once again, not symmetrically. The right hemisphere appears to be the first bringer into being of the world, but what it brings into being can only inevitably be partial. The idea that our brains are perfectly adapted to bring into being for us everything that may exist in the universe, particularly that they could bring into being everything in the universe at one time, is patently ridiculous. To use the analogy of a radio receiver, it can be tuned into only one wavelength at a time, and there will always be radio waves, not to mention other forms of waves, that it will never be able to pick up. But this filtering, this restriction, imposed on the right hemisphere is not just a limitation in the negative sense, any more than being able to transmit one programme at any one time is a negative quality in a radio. Such limitation is a condition of its functioning at all. From it, something particular is permitted to come into being for us, the world as the right hemisphere delivers it to us.

411

The left hemisphere in turn grasps, sees, receives only some of what the right hemisphere has received. Its method is selection, abstraction – in a word negation. But this selection, this narrowing, is once again not a diminution, but an increase. By restricting or selecting, something new that was not there before comes into being. The process is like sculpture, in which a thing comes into being through something else being pared away. The paring away can reveal the thing that lives within the stone: but equally that thing, whatever it is, lives only in the stone, not in the paring away on its own. Thus the stone in a sense depends on the sculptor’s hand, but not as badly as the sculptor’s hand depends on the stone. The world that we experience is a product of both hemispheres, clearly, but not in the same way. The restrictive bringing into being of something by the left hemisphere depends still on its foundation in something that underwrites it in the right hemisphere (and both of them on something that underwrites them both, outside the brain).

412

It is possible that this biphasic, and essentially apophatic (‘no-saying’), structure to the disclosing of whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves was foreseen by Max Scheler. While there is no simple equation between the right hemisphere and Scheler’s Drang, and the left hemisphere and his Geist,89 I believe this nonetheless illuminates an important element both in how the hemispheres relate to one another, and in how they together relate to whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves. The relationship between the hemispheres is permissive only. The right hemisphere can either fail to permit (by saying ‘no’) or permit (by not saying ‘no’), aspects of Being to ‘presence’ to it. Until they do so, it does not know what they are, and so cannot be involved in their being as such prior to their disclosure. Subsequent to this, the left hemisphere can only fail to permit (by saying ‘no’), or permit (by not saying ‘no’) aspects of what is ‘presented’ in the right hemisphere to be ‘re-presented’: it does not know what the right hemisphere knows and therefore cannot be involved in its coming into being as such.

413

This negatory or apophatic mode of creation of whatever-it-is is reflected in our experience that what we know about things as they truly are, starting with Being itself, is apophatic in nature: we can know only what they are not. Its particular significance is that it describes the path taken to truth by the right hemisphere, which sees things whole, and if asked to describe them has to remain ‘silent’. It has no way of coming at what this thing is other than by pointing to it, or by unconcealing it, allowing the thing to reveal itself as much as possible (by not saying ‘no’ to it, but saying ‘no’ to whatever lies around and obscures it), as a sculptor chisels away the stone to reveal the form inside. Further, because what the left hemisphere has available to it is only what it does not say ‘no’ to of what ‘presences’ to the right hemisphere, it has parts of the whole only, fragments which, if it tries to see the whole, it has wilfully to put together again. It has to try to arrive at understanding by putting together the bits and pieces, positively constructing it from the inside, as though the statue were ‘put together’. By such a process, a human person becomes like a Frankenstein’s monster, rather than a living being – not for nothing one of the originating metaphors of Romanticism.

414

This idea is not only a philosophical insight that helps us to explain what we know of the worlds brought into being by the two hemispheres at the phenomenological level. Once again we find it instantiated at the neurological level in the functional anatomy of the brain. Remember that the primary function of the corpus callosum is to act as a filter on transmission between the hemispheres,90 allowing communication to pass, but preponderantly acting to inhibit activity, thus shaping the evolution of conscious experience in, primarily, the left hemisphere. But that is not all. The most highly evolved part of the brain, the frontal cortex, achieves what it does largely by negating (or not negating) other brain activity. ‘The cortex’s job is to prevent the inappropriate response rather than to produce the appropriate one’, writes Joseph LeDoux; that is, it pares down from among things that exist, it selects, it does not originate.91 And one answer to the problem raised for free will by Libet’s experiments is that there is time between the unconscious initiation of an action and its execution for the conscious mind to intervene and ‘veto’ the action. In this sense, it may exert its influence more as ‘free won’t’ than ‘free will’.92

The frontal lobes are indisputably the parts of the brain that make us most human, that bring about for us all the greatest things we achieve. This negation is therefore hugely creative. When we remember that it is the right hemisphere that succeeds in bringing us in touch with whatever is new by an attitude of receptive openness to what is – by contrast with the left hemisphere’s view that it makes new things actively, by wilfully putting them together bit by bit – it seems that here, too, is evidence, if any further were needed, that the right hemisphere is more true to the nature of things.

414

THE PROCESS OF REINTEGRATION

415

Ultimately the principle of division (that of the left hemisphere) and the principle of union (that of the right hemisphere) need to be unified: in Hegel’s terms, the thesis and antithesis must be enabled to achieve a synthesis on a higher level. Split-brain patients can tell us a little about this level from their experiences outside the lab, in their encounters with life; for they appear to have problems with dreaming and imagination.93 In the case of dreaming, it may be that it takes place but that the difficulty lies in the left hemisphere having access to it, and therefore being able to report it. But one can see that the generation of the greatest feats of the human spirit require integration of both hemispheric worlds, and split-brain patients do appear to have an impoverished level of imagination and creativity, suggesting, as I believe to be clearly the case, that integrated functioning of both hemispheres is needed for such activity. The form that that integration takes may be far from straightforward, of course. It may be that, in the absence of the intact corpus callosum, it is impossible for either hemisphere to inhibit the other adequately and stop it from interfering for critical periods. Or it may be a failure of reintegration once the separate business is done.

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93. Bogen, 2000.

415

If the left hemisphere vision predominates, its world becomes denatured (in Heidegger’s terms, there is ‘unworlding’ of the world). Then the left hemisphere senses that something is wrong, something lacking – nothing less than life, in fact. It tries to make its productions live again by appealing to what it sees as the attributes of a living thing: novelty, excitement, stimulation. It is the faculty of imagination, however, which comes into being between the two hemispheres, which enables us to take things back from the world of the left hemisphere and make them live again in the right. It is in this way, not by meretricious novelty, that things are made truly new once again.

416

The right hemisphere needs the left hemisphere in order to be able to ‘unpack’ experience. Without its distance and structure, certainly, there could be, for example, no art, only experience – Wordsworth’s description of poetry as ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ is just one famous reflection of this. But, just as importantly, if the process ends with the left hemisphere, one has only concepts – abstractions and conceptions, not art at all. Similarly the immediate pre-conceptual sense of awe can evolve into religion only with the help of the left hemisphere: though, if the process stops there, all one has is theology, or sociology, or empty ritual: something else. It seems that, the work of division having been done by the left hemisphere, a new union must be sought, and for this to happen the process needs to be returned to the right hemisphere, so that it can live. This is why Nietzsche held that ‘in contrast to all those who are determined to derive the arts from a single principle, as the necessary source of life for every work of art, I have kept my gaze fixed on these two artistic deities of the Greeks, Apollo and Dionysos.’94 According to Nietzsche, these two gods represented the two fundamentally opposed artistic drives (Kunsttriebe): one towards order, rationality, clarity, the sort of beauty that comes with perfection, human control of nature, and the celebration of masks, representations or appearances; the other towards intuition, the over-riding of all humanly contrived boundaries, a sense of oneness or wholeness, physical pleasure and pain, and the celebration of nature beyond human control, as she really is. It will be appreciated that this contrast does not correspond neatly to the left hemisphere versus the right hemisphere – more, in neuropsychological terms, to the frontal lobes versus the more ancient, subcortical regions of the limbic system; but since, as I have emphasised, such distinctions carry with them implications for the division of the hemispheres (in that the right hemisphere is more in touch with these ancient and ‘primitive’ forces, though modulating them importantly in many respects), they have a relevance to the subject of this book.

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94. Nietzsche, 1999, §16, p. 76.

417

The left hemisphere knows things the right hemisphere does not know, just as the right knows things of which the left hemisphere is ignorant. But it is only, as I have tried to suggest in earlier chapters, the right hemisphere that is in direct contact with the embodied lived world: the left hemisphere world is, by comparison, a virtual, bloodless affair. In this sense, the left hemisphere is ‘parasitic’ on the right. It does not itself have life: its life comes from the right hemisphere, to which it can only say ‘no’ or not say ‘no’. This idea lies behind Blake’s perception in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that ‘Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy [emphasis added].’ Reason (what Blake calls elsewhere Ratio, closer to rationality than reason) draws its very existence from the delimitation of something else in which the life actually inheres. This is not, as Blake may have intended it, to decry the importance of reason, but it is to say something important about its ontological status. Similarly the relationship between the hemispheres entails more than an equal and symmetrical participation of the two: there is an asymmetry between the principles of division (left hemisphere) and unification (right hemisphere), ultimately in favour of union. Heidegger was not alone in seeing that beauty lies in the coming to rest of opposites, that have been sharply distinguished, in the connectedness of a harmonious unity. The need for ultimate unification of division with union is an important principle in all areas of life; it reflects the need not just for two opposing principles, but for their opposition ultimately to be harmonised. The relation between union and division is not in this sense, once again, equal or symmetrical.95

418

Thinkers and philosophers of the Romantic tradition have struggled to express this idea in different ways. I introduce the term ‘Romantic’ here with some trepidation, because to some it suggests the limitations of a circumscribed period of recent Western cultural history, in their minds associated with fantasy and lack of rigour. Unfortunately it is the only term we have to refer to a philosophical, as much as cultural, revolution which heralded the beginnings of a reawareness of the power of metaphorical thought, of the limitations of classical, non-paraconsistent logic, and the adoption of non-mechanistic ways of thinking about the world, which belatedly enabled us to catch up with ideas that have been for centuries, if not millennia, current in Eastern cultures. With the advent of Romanticism, paradox became once more not a sign of error, but, as it had been seen by Western philosophers before Plato, and by all the major schools of thought in the East before and since, as a sign of the necessary limitation of our customary modes of language and thought, to be welcomed, rather than rejected, on the path towards truth. ‘Paradox is everything simultaneously good and great’, wrote Friedrich Schlegel.96

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96. ‘Critical Fragments’, §48, in F. Schlegel, 1991, p. 6.

418

As I say, the Romantics, struggled to express the idea of the unity of union with division.97 Here is Schlegel again: ‘Where philosophy stops, poetry has to begin … Whatever can be done while poetry and philosophy are separated has been done and accomplished. So the time has come to unite the two.’98 Making a slightly different point, but in a similar vein, he wrote: ‘It is equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none. It will simply have to decide to combine the two.’99 And Coleridge wrote in his Biographia Literaria:

In order to obtain adequate notions of any truth, we must intellectually separate its distinguishable parts; and this is the technical process of philosophy. But having done so, we must then restore them in our conceptions to the unity in which they actually co-exist; and this is the result of philosophy.100

Hegel, too, held that union and division have themselves to be unified, suggesting the ultimate priority of the principle of union over that of division, despite the necessary part played by division at one stage of the process. ‘Everything’, he wrote (with characteristic impenetrability) ‘depends on the unity of differentiatedness and non-differentiatedness, or the identity of identity and non-identity.’101

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98. ‘Ideas’, §48 & §108, in F. Schlegel, 2003, pp. 263 & 265.

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99. ‘Athenaeum Fragments’, §53, in F. Schlegel, 2003, p. 247.

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100. Coleridge, 1965, vol. II, ch. xiv, p. 171.

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101. ‘With what must science begin?’, in Hegel, 1969, vol. I, Bk. i, §112: ‘… [die] Einheit des Unterschieden- und des Nichtunterschiedenseyns, – oder [die] Identität der Identität und Nichtidentität’.

419

The concept of the individual (entity or person, whatever it may be) is therefore an ambiguous concept. On the one hand it can be seen as a part, which has prior existence to the whole in which it resides, and that whole is seen as reached by summing the parts – the individual as a ‘unit’ in a complex of units, like a block amongst building blocks (left hemisphere point of view). On the other, the individual can itself be seen as a whole, indivisible into parts from which that whole could ever be recreated once dismembered; but nonetheless not itself separate from a greater whole to which it belongs, and which is reflected in it, from which, even, it derives its individuality (right hemisphere point of view). Thus, according to this point of view, the divisive tendency towards individuation exists within the tendency to union; individual entities are distinguished, but only within a union which supervenes, and qualifies that distinction. In Romanticism, as I shall suggest later, this sense of individuality, as applied to the human individual, was sustainable, but nonetheless felt to exist within the context of something broader and deeper than itself, towards which it tended. This tending towards something else did not annihilate the individuality of the self, but grounded it.

420

The system building of the left hemisphere has been very powerful historically, because it is rhetorically powerful. It looks like being a way of integrating, or reintegrating, the disparate facts or entities that the left hemisphere has itself created.

But in fact it creates something very different from the whole that has been lost. I would merely draw attention, following Elster, to the fact that rationalistic systems contain the seeds of their own destruction. In a Gödelian way, there are always elements that arise from within the system (rationally conceived goals) that cannot be achieved by the system (rational means of pursuit), and that indeed draw our attention to the limits of the system, and point us beyond. Similarly there are tensions between the rational pursuit of certainty and the desire for knowledge, since, as Hegel pointed out, ‘immediacy’ (the quality of being understandable without the need for any other concept or idea) is not compatible with determinacy, and hence certainty is purchased at the expense of content: ‘The more certain our knowledge the less we know.’102 The more we pinpoint something to be certain of it, the less we actually know of it, the equivalent of the uncertainty principle referred to above.103

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103. See p. 136 above.

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102. Scruton, 1997, p. 152.

421

The difficulty of articulating the deeply felt distinction between, on the one hand, a vision of the world as an assemblage of parts or fragments that need, in order to be understood, to be aggregated into a system (left hemisphere), and the appreciation of individual, or particular, entities that are never separate from the whole to which they belong, and from which unity, paradoxical as it may seem, they derive their individuality (right hemisphere), preoccupied and perplexed the Romantics. In Coleridge’s letters, and in his Biographia Literaria, one sees him struggling towards a clearer perception of this duality; indeed finding a way of illuminating this deeply felt aspect of the mind’s own duality was the battle in which he was engaged for most of his intellectual life. He wrote:

I can at times feel strongly the beauties, you describe, in themselves, & for themselves—but more frequently all things appear little—all the knowledge, that can be acquired, child’s play—the universe itself—what but an immense heap of little things?—I can contemplate nothing but parts, & parts are all little—!—My mind feels as if it ached to behold & know something great—something one & indivisible and it is only in the faith of this that rocks or waterfalls, mountains or caverns give me the sense of sublimity or majesty!—But in this faith all things counterfeit infinity! [emphasis in the original].104

By contrast, only a few days later he wrote of his

love of ‘the Great’, & ‘the Whole’.—Those who have been led to the same truths step by step thro’ the constant testimony of their senses, seem to me to want a sense which I possess—They contemplate nothing but parts—and all parts are necessarily little—and the Universe to them is but a mass of little things.105

By the end of the nineteenth century, Nietzsche had concluded that this vision of a mass of disconnected little things was not just another way of seeing, but an artificial way, imposed on the underlying connectedness of existence for the convenience of knowing: ‘there are no lasting, final units, no atoms, no monads: here too the ‘being’ of things has been inserted by us (for practical, useful, perspectival reasons)’.106 What he means here by the ‘“being” of things’ is the sense of finished, independently existing entities, rather than an interconnected whole always in the process of becoming: a sense that is imposed on the world by the left hemisphere for ‘practical, useful, perspectival reasons’, parts and systems being a by-product of the process of ‘knowing’, left-hemisphere fashion.

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104. Coleridge, 1956–71, vol. 1, p. 349.

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105. ibid., p. 354.

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106. Nietzsche, 2003, §11 [73], p. 212 (emphasis in original).

422

‘My mind feels as if it ached to behold & know something great …’ In German the feeling of longing for something that exists outside the self to which it feels itself to be connected was crystallised in the word das Sehnen, often translated into English as ‘longing’. What this concept seems to me to enshrine is the feeling of being connected to something but removed from it. The connection remains despite the distance, and the separation despite the sense of union. Why I bring this up here is that the distinction exists within the union, which trumps it. However distinguished, the individual remains part of the whole and is understandable only in terms of the whole of which it forms a part.

The word das Sehnen, longing, is from the same root as die Sehne, a tendon. The object of longing is that towards which we ‘tend’, and ‘tendon’ is similarly related to the words ‘tend’ and ‘tendency’. In fact the English word ‘sinew’ is cognate with die Sehne, and ‘sinew’ used to refer to the whole elastic union of muscle and tendon. These images suggest the workings of a joint, such as for example, the elbow. The joint is made possible by the existence of the tendon, an elastic connection that allows the bones that take part in the joint (but do not constitute the joint) to move away from one another and to remain connected, or to move together and remain separate; an image picked up wittily, but nonetheless profoundly, by Donne in his pair of compasses, the image of the two lovers in A Valediction: forbidding mourning. The significance of these ideas will become more apparent in Part II.

424

There is, in summary, then, a force for individuation (left hemisphere) and a force for coherence (right hemisphere): but, wherever the whole is not the same as the sum of the parts, the force for individuation exists within and subject to the force for coherence. In this sense the ‘givens’ of the left hemisphere need to be once again ‘given up’ to be reunified through the operations of the right hemisphere. This sense that the rationality of the left hemisphere must be resubmitted to, and subject to, the broader contextualising influence of the right hemisphere, with all its emotional complexity, must surely explain the eminently sane and reasonable philosopher David Hume’s assertion that ‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and so never can pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.’107 He did not mean that unbridled passion should rule our judgments, but that the rational workings of the left hemisphere (though he could not have known that that was what they were) should be subject to the intuitive wisdom of the right hemisphere (though he equally could not have recognised it as such). If reason arises from feeling, as Vauvenargues says, and should in turn bow to feeling, as Hume here suggests, this perfectly expresses my view that what arises in the left hemisphere does so from the right hemisphere, and needs to be subject to it once more.

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107. Hume, 1986, ‘Of the Influencing Motives of the Will’, p. 22.

424

REINTEGRATION AS AUFHEBUNG

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I have expressed this reintegration in terms of a ‘return’ to the right hemisphere. This risks suggesting that the achievements of the left hemisphere’s interventions are lost or nullified, reduced only to a remembrance to be borne in mind when looking at the new whole achieved by the right hemisphere, as though one were looking at the same whole as before, only with new eyes. This would be like a child taking a watch to bits and putting it together again. The only significant sense in which the reintegrated watch would now be different would be in the child’s newfound knowledge of its constituent parts; an important difference for the child, to be sure, but not effectively altering the watch. Once again we are misled by the metaphor of a mechanism, a watch, that is, at least in one sense, no more than the sum of its parts.

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Instead, the pattern I would adopt to explain the way in which this process occurs in the bihemispheric apprehension of the world is that of Hegel’s Aufhebung. The word, often translated as sublation, literally means a ‘lifting up’ of something, and refers to the way in which the earlier stages of an organic process, although superseded by those that come after, are not repudiated by them, even though the later stages are incompatible with the earlier ones. In this sense the earlier stage is ‘lifted up’ into the subsequent stage both in the sense that it is ‘taken up into’ or ‘subsumed’ into the succeeding stage, and in the sense that it remains present in, but transformed by, a ‘higher’ level of the process. In a famous passage near the opening of the Preface to The Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel illustrates it by reference to the development of a plant:

The bud disappears when the blossom breaks through, and we might say that the former is refuted by the latter; in the same way when the fruit comes, the blossom may be explained to be a false form of the plant’s existence, for the fruit appears as its true nature in place of the blossom. These stages are not merely differentiated; they supplant one another as being incompatible with one another. But the ceaseless activity of their own inherent nature makes them at the same time moments of an organic unity, where they not merely do not contradict one another, but where one is as necessary as the other; and this equal necessity of all moments constitutes alone and thereby the life of the whole.108

Thus what is offered by the left hemisphere should be and needs to be aufgehoben by the right hemisphere, not cancelling the left hemisphere’s contribution, but taking it further, by drawing it back into the realm of unification (in fact in German aufgehoben positively includes the idea of being preserved, as well as transformed).

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108. Hegel, 1949, p. 68.

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It’s not just that Hegel happens to crystallise the relationship of the hemispheres with this concept, or even that the relationship of the hemispheres is an example of dialectical ontology – the nature of existence arising out of opposition or negation. Hegel, along with Heraclitus and Heidegger, has a particular place in the unfolding story of the relationship between the cerebral hemispheres, in that, it seems to me, his philosophy actually tries to express the mind’s intuition of its own structure – if you like, the mind cognising itself. His spirit is like an unseen presence in this book, and it is necessary to devote a few pages to his heroic attempts to articulate, in relation to the structure of the mind or spirit (Geist), what lies almost beyond articulation, even now that we have knowledge of the structure of the brain.

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But there is a far more interesting, and far more profoundly prescient, passage that follows this in Phenomenology of Spirit (B, IV, B), that on the ‘Unhappy Consciousness’. Here he is talking of something quite different, something of immediate relevance to the subject of this book: the inward division of the mind or spirit, which finds itself split into a ‘master’ subself and a ‘slave’ subself. The description of the relationship of these two parts of the mind uncannily foresees what neurological research was going to reveal about the workings of the brain, and which forms the subject of this book, except that Hegel is using the term ‘master’ here to refer to the usurping force that I associate with the left hemisphere – in other words to the emissary turned despot, known as the ‘major’ hemisphere – and the ‘slave’ to refer to the true Master, ill-treated by the usurper, which I associate with the right hemisphere, the ‘silent’ or ‘minor’ hemisphere.110

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In a rather dense passage from the same work, Hegel gives such a brilliant exposition of what neurological research appears to indicate that I include it here as the most extraordinary instance of the mind by introspection ‘cognising itself’. He gives in the first paragraph what seems to me to be a perfect description of the weaknesses of the approach to the real world made by the left hemisphere so long as it remains unresolved by subsequent engagement of the right hemisphere. In the second paragraph he describes how true knowledge redeems itself by ‘returning back into itself’ in the right hemisphere (the italics, and of course the interpolations, are mine):

If the specific determination … is one that in itself is concrete or actual [as present to the RH], it all the same gets degraded [by the formal understanding of the LH] into something lifeless and inert [because merely a re-presentation], since it is merely predicated of another existing entity, and not known as an immanent living principle of this existence [which are all LH modes, by contrast with those of the RH]; nor is there any comprehension of how in this entity its intrinsic and peculiar way of expressing and producing itself takes effect [as the RH would be able to understand, with its ability to appreciate such deep-lying and unique qualities, by contrast with the LH]. This, the very kernel of the matter, formal understanding leaves to others to add later on [the LH leaves for the RH to reinstitute at a later stage of reintegration, which is why such a reintegration is essential]. Instead of making its way into the inherent content of the matter in hand [as the RH would], understanding always takes a survey of the whole [from the LH’s vantage point on the vertical axis, as if reading a map], assumes a position above the particular existence about which it is speaking, i.e., it does not see it at all.

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Here Hegel has brilliantly seized the difference between the reality of the world as originally perceived by the right hemisphere, and the ‘formal understanding’ of it by the left. He continues:

True scientific knowledge, on the contrary, demands abandonment to the very life of the object [the mode that only the RH can achieve], or, which means the same thing, claims to have before it the inner necessity controlling the object, and to express this only. Steeping itself in its object [along the horizontal axis, as the RH does], it forgets to take that general survey [as the LH would have done], which is merely a turning of knowledge away from the content back into itself [alluding to the inevitably self-referring nature of the LH]. But being sunk into the material in hand, and following the course that such material takes, true knowledge returns back into itself [to its origin in the RH], yet not before the content in its fullness [as fully ‘unpacked’ by the LH, its invaluable contribution] is taken into itself, is reduced to the simplicity of being a determinate characteristic, drops to the level of being one aspect of an existing entity [not just what the LH sees, but taken alongside, and in the context of, what the RH yields], and passes over into its higher truth [as revealed by the final Aufhebung of both RH and LH]. By this process the whole as such, surveying its entire content, itself emerges out of the wealth wherein its process of reflection seemed to be lost [the return to the RH recovers the whole, now made richer by the LH process in which it had threatened to be lost].111

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111. Hegel, 1949, pp. 112–13.

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What is offered by the right hemisphere to the left hemisphere is offered back again and taken up into a synthesis involving both hemispheres. This must be true of the processes of creativity, of the understanding of works of art, of the development of the religious sense. In each there is a progress from an intuitive apprehension of whatever it may be, via a more formal process of enrichment through conscious, detailed analytic understanding, to a new, enhanced intuitive understanding of this whole, now transformed by the process that it has undergone.

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This idea, though difficult, is critically important, because the theme of Part II of this book will be that there has been a tendency for the left hemisphere to see the workings of the right hemisphere as purely incompatible, antagonistic, as a threat to its dominion – the emissary perceiving the Master to be a tyrant. This is an inevitable consequence of the fact that the left hemisphere can support only a mechanistic view of the world, according to which it would certainly be true that the unifying tendency of the right hemisphere would reverse its achievements in delineating individual entities. According to that view, opposition cannot result in sublation, a negation of negation, but only negation pure and simple. But this is to see according to ‘either/or’; and to see individual entities as atomistic, like billiard balls operating in a vacuum – there being no larger entities, except those that are the sum of the interactions of the individual ‘billiard balls’. Nature in fact abhors a vacuum, as we all know, and there is therefore not nothing between the ‘billiard balls’. Rather than separate entities in a vacuum, we might think of individual entities as dense nodes within some infinitely stretchable or distensible viscous substance, some existential goo – neither ultimately separable nor ultimately confounded, though neither without identity nor without the sense of ultimate union.

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This idea explains the apparently paradoxical attempt according to the spiritual practices of all traditions to ‘annihilate’ the self. Why would one want to do such a thing, if the point of creation was to produce the infinite variety embodied in the myriad selves of all the unique existing beings in the created world? Would this not be just to strive to reverse the creative process, and return from Being to Nothing? Instead what I understand by this miscalled ‘annihilation’ of the self is a sacrifice of the boundaries which once defined the self, not in vitiation of the self, but in its kenosis, a transformation whereby it is emptied out into a whole which is larger than itself.112 So it is that neither the bud nor the blossom is repudiated by, but rather aufgehoben in, the fruit.

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112. For a discussion of kenosis in neuropsychological terms, see Teske, 1996.

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As I have suggested above, all apparently ‘complete’ systems, such as the left hemisphere creates, show themselves ultimately, not just by the standards or values of the right hemisphere, but even in their own terms, to be incomplete. In addition, whether or not the superstructure holds up, their foundations lie in, and are ‘bootstrapped’ on, intuition: the premises from which the rational system building begins, and even the rational mode of operation itself, that of the value of reason, cannot be confirmed by the process of rationalistic systematisation, but need ultimately to be intuited. That does not invalidate our intuition in favour of reason, of course, any more than it invalidates other of our intuitions, such as the value of goodness, or of beauty, or of truthfulness, or the existence of God. (Wittgenstein in the Tractatus describes each of logic, ethics and aesthetics as transcendental.113 ) But it does mean that they take their origin from the right hemisphere, and cannot transcend their origins except by reverting to the right hemisphere in a process of sublation or Aufhebung. However much rationalistic systems give the illusion of completeness – and they can be very hard to escape for those who cannot see their weaknesses – they do in fact conceal within themselves the clue of thread that leads out of the maze.

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113. Wittgenstein, 2001, §6.13 & §6.421, pp. 78 & 86.

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The left hemisphere seems to play a crucial role in determining what comes into being; it is part of the process of creation. Applying linear, sequential analysis forces the implicit into explicitness, and brings clarity; this is crucial in helping bring about an aspect of what is there. But, in doing so, the whole is lost.

Demiurge maybe?👀

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Here again we are brought to face the incompatibility of what we need to do. We have to attend openly to the world in order not to miss something new or important that will tend to change the way we look at any one thing; and yet to focus on one thing so that we can see what it is well enough that, once relinquished, it can return to being constitutive of the whole picture in an enriched sense. Again we are made to recognise that to see clearly one aspect is to conceal another aspect: that truth is a concealing as well as an unconcealing. The difficulty is an expression of the fundamental incompatibility involved in mounting the vertical axis at the same time that we go out as far as possible into the world along the horizontal axis.114 Living seems to force us, like Schrödinger’s cat, into some sort of limiting option. It seems that we cannot achieve specificity in observation and at the same time preserve the other characteristics of the object of our attention, much as a light wave (a process) collapses and behaves like a particle (an isolated entity) if it is pinned down by detailed observation.

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114. See p. 21 above.

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The right hemisphere needs not to know what the left hemisphere knows, for that would destroy its ability to understand the whole; at the same time the left hemisphere cannot know what the right hemisphere knows. From inside its own system, from its own point of view, what it believes it has ‘created’ appears complete. Just because what it produces is in focus and at the centre of the field of vision, it is more easily seen. This is one reason we are so much more aware of what it contributes to our knowledge of the world.

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The left hemisphere cannot deliver anything new direct from ‘outside’, but it can unfold, or ‘unpack’, what it is given. Its very strength – and it contains enormous strength, as the history of civilisation demonstrates – lies in the fact that it can render explicit what the right hemisphere has to leave implicit, leave folded in. Yet that is also its weakness. The clarifying explicitness needs to be reintegrated with the sense of the whole, the now unpacked or unfolded whatever-it-may-be being handed back to the domain of the right hemisphere, where it once more lives. This turns out to be a problem, as I shall try to explain in the next chapter.

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CHAPTER 6

THE TRIUMPH OF THE LEFT HEMISPHERE

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LOOKING BACK OVER THE EVIDENCE I HAVE DISCUSSED IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER from philosophy, neurology and neuropsychology, it would appear that there is a good chance that the right hemisphere may be seeing more of the whole picture. Despite the left hemisphere’s conviction of its own self-sufficiency, everything about the relationship of the hemispheres to one another and to reality suggests the primacy of the right hemisphere, both in grounding experience (at the bottom level) and in reconstituting left-hemisphere-processed experience once again as living (at the top level). We have also seen that many important aspects of experience, those that the right hemisphere is particularly well equipped to deal with – our passions, our sense of humour, all metaphoric and symbolic understanding (and with it the metaphoric and symbolic nature of art), all religious sense, all imaginative and intuitive processes – are denatured by becoming the object of focussed attention, which renders them explicit, therefore mechanical, lifeless. The value of the left hemisphere is precisely in making explicit, but this is a staging post, an intermediate level of the ‘processing’ of experience, never the starting point or end point, never the deepest, or the final, level. The relationship between the hemispheres is therefore highly significant for the type of world we find ourselves living in.

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The left hemisphere is competitive, and its concern, its prime motivation, is power. If the working relationship were to become disturbed, so that the left hemisphere appeared to have primacy or became the end point or final staging post on the ‘processing’ of experience, the world would change into something quite different. And we can say fairly clearly what that would be like: it would be relatively mechanical, an assemblage of more or less disconnected ‘parts’; it would be relatively abstract and disembodied; relatively distanced from fellow-feeling; given to explicitness; utilitarian in ethic; over-confident of its own take on reality, and lacking insight into its problems – the neuropsychological evidence is that these are all aspects of the left hemisphere world as compared with the right.

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What do we know of the relationship between the hemispheres in practice, and where could our knowledge, not of hemisphere differences, but of the working relationship of the hemispheres come from? There is limited mileage in looking at functional imaging, since its time frames are too large to detect most hemisphere interactions; and the EEG lacks specificity. There is a tendency simply to find, at any one moment in time, that areas in both hemispheres are involved (once again I would emphasise that everything human involves both hemispheres: we do virtually nothing with one hemisphere alone).

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Just as what we know about the normal functioning of the brain comes from very particular accidents of nature, or from carefully contrived artificial experiments that highlight what otherwise goes unremarked, so what we know about relations between the hemispheres comes from careful observation of how they operate in highly specialised circumstances that allow their ‘working relationship’ to come under scrutiny. Some such evidence comes from carefully designed experiments on normal subjects in which the reactions of the hemispheres can be artificially separated and their interactions minutely observed. However, a particularly rich source has been split-brain patients.

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My thesis is that the hemispheres have complementary but conflicting tasks to fulfil, and need to maintain a high degree of mutual ignorance. At the same time they need to co-operate. How is this achieved, and what is their working relationship like?

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The corpus callosum, and the other subcortical structures, such as the cerebral commissures, which communicate between the hemispheres also have complementary but conflicting roles.1 They need to share information, but at the same time to keep the worlds where that information is handled separate. At the beginning of this book I referred to neurological evidence that the corpus callosum is largely inhibitory in function. That sounds competitive, but it might be co-operative, because co-operation requires difference, not more of the same. An action in one hemisphere is not usually best mirrored in the other: it is not co-operation for the surgeon and the assistant both to try to make the incision. In order to achieve many musical effects, whether between the singers in a choir, or the members of a string ensemble, or the two hands of a pianist, especially where there are fugal elements, discords, cross-rhythms and syncopations, it is equally vital for the performer to be sensitive to, and attentive to, one set of experiences, and simultaneously to be taken up in, and express, another, that may appear, at the local level, to be in conflict with it. We must inhibit one in order to inhabit the other. If one thinks of the relationship between the hemispheres as being like that between the two hands of the pianist (whose two hemispheres do indeed have to co-operate, but equally must remain independent), one can see that the task of the corpus callosum has to be as much to do with inhibition of process as it is with facilitation of information transfer, and co-operation requires the correct balance to be maintained.

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We looked earlier at neurological evidence, but what of the phenomenological evidence – what actually happens in the world of the patient whose corpus callosum suddenly stops functioning? I mentioned that split-brain patients lead remarkably normal lives. If one met them, went out for a meal with them, or even went on holiday with them, one might never guess that there was anything unusual about them. Under certain laboratory conditions, in which the workings of the two hemispheres can be artificially isolated, we can learn about their independent function; but this apart, split-brain patients have not appeared particularly handicapped. Which invites the question, why ever not?

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As far as sharing information goes, most experience of the external world is not confined to one hemisphere, and there is considerable redundancy in the system: ‘As we move around the world looking at objects, touching them, hearing sounds, and so forth, most of the information is taken in by both cerebral hemispheres. In addition, both hemispheres are usually able to generate some appropriate behavioural response.’2 We are not by any means completely reliant on callosal transmission. In fact, for this reason, experimental conditions for testing each hemisphere of a split-brain subject in isolation have to be carefully planned so that stimuli reach one hemisphere alone. And, as with all human beings, most of what each hemisphere knows, it knows in common with its counterpart. Both hemispheres, after all, have been through the same experiences, shared the same body, and indeed still are united in that body: everything below the corpus callosum – the diencephalon, the cerebellum, the brainstem, the spinal cord, and all the rest – and all that the body communicates to them second by second, they continue to share. Furthermore, as Sperry’s colleague Joseph Bogen points out, even in normal subjects no connective pathways, even in the corpus callosum, function all the time; and lengthy neurotransmission times across the corpus callosum enforce a degree of interhemispheric independence.3

That is just as well because, as I have emphasised, there are good reasons why nature has conserved the great divide between the hemispheres. Each hemisphere has to remain independent, and inevitably remain to some extent ignorant, of what goes on in its counterpart. Inhibition is the other primary function, perhaps the principal function, of the corpus callosum.4 How does splitting it affect that?

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3. Ringo, Doty, Demeter et al., 1994.

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In the long run, not as badly as one might think. By the time the brain is surgically divided, each hemisphere has had years of working with an intact corpus callosum during which to establish its own specialised modes of operation, laid down as memories in the patterns of neuronal connection within either hemisphere. So it is not the establishing, only the functional maintenance, of such specialisation that is impaired.

Nonetheless, in the first months following surgery, split-brain patients reported some rather disconcerting experiences. These took the form of an apparent conflict of will, displayed in so-called intermanual conflict. Such was the case of a man who found himself in the unfortunate position of going to embrace his wife with one arm and pushing her away with the other.5 Other patients with disruption of the corpus callosum have reported similar experiences, for example:

On several occasions while driving, the left hand reached up and grabbed the steering wheel from the right hand. The problem was persistent and severe enough that she had to give up driving. She reported instances in which the left hand closed doors the right hand had opened, unfolded sheets the right had folded, snatched money the right had offered to a store cashier, and disrupted her reading by turning pages and closing books.6

Or: ‘I open the closet door. I know what I want to wear. As I reach for something with my right hand, my left comes up and takes something different. I can’t put it down if it’s in my left hand. I have to call my daughter.’7 Notice that it is always the left hand that is ‘misbehaving’: I will return to that shortly.

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5. Gazzaniga, 1970.

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6. Baynes, Tramo, Reeves et al., 1997, p. 1160.

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7. Ferguson, Rayport & Corrie, 1985, p. 504.

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These symptoms tended to settle with time. In fact split-brain patients manage surprisingly well, in that ‘despite having two independent and different cognitive processors, they behave as unified individuals and seldom display signs of hesitation, confusion or dissociation in their day-to-day activities’.8 This is because, although callosotomy severs the principal means of transfer of information between hemispheres, there are other subcortical tracts that connect them, sharing information and helping inhibit function, even if using some of these ‘detours’ takes some retraining of the brain.9

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8. Sergent, 1983b.

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9. Sergent, 1983a, 1986 & 1990.

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But the nature of the initial experience following operation bears further consideration, nonetheless. Such stories have been somewhat discounted, perhaps because of the tendency for commentators to rush into speculations about the divisibility of the self. However, Roger Sperry himself, who won a Nobel prize for his work on split brains, wrote, ‘both the left and right hemispheres may be conscious simultaneously in different, even in mutually conflicting, mental experiences that run along in parallel.’10 Such an idea clearly does raise questions about the self and personal identity, questions that have been much discussed, particularly by philosophers in the 1960s and 1970s when the research on split-brain subjects was getting to be known. But my purpose in referring to these experiences here is to suggest that the main evidence of disturbance following the operation was not, as might have been expected, things that no longer happened, but just the opposite – things that couldn’t be prevented from happening, which, in other words, couldn’t be inhibited. In this respect, split-brain subjects are like patients who have suffered a stroke or other neurological injury affecting the pathways through the corpus callosum: there is a problem of compromised interhemispheric inhibition.11 It is worse for those with callosal agenesis (a common condition, affecting up to 1 per cent of the population, in which the corpus callosum fails to develop),12 or those with congenital dysfunction of the corpus callosum: they have never had the advantage of living with a functional divide, and so cannot develop the usual interhemispheric inhibition in the first place.13

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10. Sperry, 1974, p. 11. See also Joseph, 1988a.

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11. Boroojerdi, Diefenbach & Ferbert, 1996; Boroojerdi, Hungs, Mull et al., 1998; Schnider, Benson & Rosner, 1993.

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12. Cioni, Bartalena & Boldrini, 1994.

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13. Rothwell, Colebatch, Britton et al., 1991; Meyer, Röricht, Gräfin von Einsiedel et al., 1995; Meyer, Röricht & Woiciechowsky, 1998.

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Incompetence of the corpus callosum has been implicated in the genesis of some psychiatric disorders, notably in the psychosis of schizophrenia; and this is in keeping with the fact that cases of psychosis have been found in association with complete and partial agenesis of the corpus callosum.14 If the main effect of an intact normal corpus callosum is inhibitory, its being compromised will have unpredictable results: either it will prove creatively fruitful, or it will simply be disruptive, by causing premature collapse into unity of elements or processes whose mutual independence needed to be maintained. Research in schizophrenia, using neuropsychological testing, as well as EEG and other measures, demonstrates precisely a failure of interhemispheric inhibition. In schizotypy, too, there is known to be intrusion of left-hemisphere modes into right-hemisphere functioning.15 Many of the phenomena of schizophrenia and of schizotypy – both the potentially creative (flying mathematicians) and the obviously disruptive effects (inhibited trapeze artists, see pp. 12–13) – could be explained by such intrusions, including intrusions of right-hemisphere modes into left-hemisphere functioning, as well as intrusion of left-hemisphere modes into right-hemisphere functioning.

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14. Swayze, Andreasen, Ehrhardt et al., 1990; Lewis, Reveley, David et al., 1988; Filteau, Pourcher, Bouchard et al., 1991; Velek, White, Williams et al., 1988; Degreef, Lantos, Bogerts et al., 1992; MacPherson, Holgate & Gudeman, 1987.

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15. Goodarzi, Wykes & Hemsley, 2000.

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In other words incompetence or agenesis of the corpus callosum leads to a picture of apparently increased interconnectivity of function.16 This apparently paradoxical finding makes sense if the main purpose of the corpus callosum is to maintain separation of the hemispheres.17

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16. David, 1987; Merrin, Floyd & Fein, 1989. Studies of the ability to inhibit motor-evoked potentials are in agreement with these findings: Boroojerdi, Töpper, Foltys et al., 1999; Höppner, Kunesch, Großmann et al., 2001.

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(Devinsky & Laff, 2003, p. 615).

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THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE HEMISPHERES

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What do we know of the normal working relationship of the hemispheres, in those whose brains have not been artificially split? Is it one of harmony or discord? The question is not simple. Just as inhibition may be maintained in the interests of co-operation, co-operation may be maintained in the interests of competition: where two co-operate, the first may do so in a reciprocal spirit, while the second does so out of self-interest, that self-interest benefitting from the generosity of spirit of the first.

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Moreover we have to distinguish between different levels of a relationship. Think of the relationship between two colleagues, who together run a small business. Which relationship are we talking about? At the simplest level one could describe the business partners’ day-to-day mode of working together. So, for example, one could say that they share an office, and, what’s more, share a breadth of training and experience in the work that they do, so that both can field enquiries. Each is acknowledged, nonetheless, to have special interests and expertise, and accordingly, where practicable, they split the work along agreed lines, especially where the work is complex; but where it would be quicker or more expedient, because, say, one of them is out of the office and an immediate response is needed, the other will step in and do whatever is required. At this level, and in this sense, the relationship appears pretty balanced and unproblematic.

But that might not be the relationship I’m thinking of. I mean, how do their roles interact, and how does each contribute to the work of the company as a whole? This is a rather different question, and takes us beyond the day-to-day, to something more like ‘month-to-month’ mode, a middle level.

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Here, say, it might turn out that Franny is particularly interested in, and gifted at, bringing in new business; Fred, being a bit more of a backroom type, is better at doing the accounting and IT work. Without new business coming in, the outfit will fold; equally they will hardly survive without proper accountancy and IT support. So each needs the other. However, let’s say that Fred has decided that the future lies in developing new and better accounting software systems, that that’s what really matters. Anyone, he says to himself, can find the business; it takes someone special to keep the figures balanced, the systems running and ticking over. As a result Fred spends much of his time using the business data to help him develop more sophisticated software, and doesn’t prioritise getting the figures ready for Franny’s meetings with clients. He is given to feeling superior to Franny, telling himself there’s nothing much she does that anyone couldn’t do. At the same time Franny resents Fred spending so much of his time on what appear to be technicalities, freeloading on her ability to forge connections and make deals, and then letting her down at the last minute. There is an atmosphere in the office: bad-tempered exchanges, cool silences. And that represents another aspect of their relationship.

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But there is a third level to this relationship; not the day-to-day, not even the month-to-month, but the long-term plan, which I just happen to have heard about. Unknown to Franny, Fred has decided he is going to take the company’s data, ditch Franny, do a moonlight flit and start up an IT business all of his own.

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I’m well aware that hemispheres are not people. Nor is this vignette supposed to sum up the relationship between the cerebral hemispheres. It is designed to do one thing only: to suggest that there would be different answers to the question how the hemispheres relate depending on the level at which we are looking. We need to look at the lowest level, the ‘day-to-day’ nitty-gritty of how they get through the work together – who answers the telephone. We need also to step back a bit, to the middle level, and look at how their roles complement one another in constructing our world – in theory, and, which may not be the same thing, in practice. And we should not forget to look at the long-term strategy, something that an outsider might know about before one of the partners.

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LEVEL ONE

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If we start with level one, the ‘day-to-day’ – or in the case of the hemispheres, millisecond-to-millisecond – relationship, certainly their ‘takes’ on the world are both necessary to us from moment to moment as living human beings. It is not just that the three-dimensional space in which we move, as beings with bodies, requires bilateral engagement with the environment, and therefore bilateral engagement of the brain; our thinking processes, which define us as humans, involve the need for intuition and conceptualisation together. To the extent that the left hemisphere is the locus of conceptualised knowledge, and to the extent that the right hemisphere embodies intuitive perception, it is clear that both are necessary, and that a balance needs to be kept. Kant’s famous formula, Begriffe ohne Anschauungen sind leer, Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind (‘concepts without intuitions are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind’), applies here.23 Viewed from the standpoint of utility and task achievement, most ordinary tasks of daily life require ‘input’ from both spheres; and from the natural standpoint of everyday living, the world that we experience in the ordinary way is a fusion of what each hemisphere delivers. So it’s clearly going to be in our best interests for the hemispheres to co-operate.24

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I mentioned earlier, however, the nonchalance with which the left hemisphere makes up what is going on in the right hemisphere when in reality it has no idea. There is something intriguing about its reluctance to admit ignorance. Some subtle experiments looking at sequences of tasks that would normally call into action the two hemispheres differentially suggest that their mode of interaction is not one in which they co-operate over what each does best, like some parody of an ideal bureaucratic government, but instead is more like the real thing, one of rivalry between departments.25 The competition between the hemispheres can actually impair performance (which is no doubt why they are able mutually to inhibit one another).

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25. See Galin & Ornstein, 1972; Levy, Trevarthen & Sperry, 1972; Bogen & Bogen, 1969; and TenHouten, 1985.

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I think it would be a mistake to attribute will to these millisecond-by-millisecond decisions. I do think a hemisphere can have a will, but it needs time to exert it. It is striking, on the one hand, that

a hemisphere assumes control of processing as a result of set or expectation as to the nature of the processing requirements prior to actual information processing, and …it remains in control even if its performance, for whatever reasons, is considerably worse than that which could have been produced by the opposite side of the brain.26

It’s as if each hemisphere took the view: ‘If this letter looks as if it’s addressed to me, I’m going to deal with it, even if it turns out on opening it that it was really addressed to you.’ There may be good reasons for this approach. For example, if there were excessive time costs in sending the information across to the other side for processing, it might be better to accept the somewhat inferior response because it would come quicker. The mutually inconsistent modes of processing adopted by the hemispheres create a difficulty, requiring something like an umpire for situations in which both cerebral hemispheres have access to the same information at the same time. Such ‘umpire decisions’ may be made at a very low level, below that of the hemispheres themselves, and there may be a ‘metacontrol’ switch, as far down as the brainstem, that apportions work between the hemispheres.27

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26. Levy & Trevarthen, 1976, p. 300.

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27. ‘The tonic and/or phasic status of the several modulatory systems of the brainstem seem fully capable of apportioning their effects to favour one or the other hemisphere in gaining ascendancy in metacontrol’ (Kavcic, Fei, Hu et al., 2000, p. 81).

452

From the split-brain patients, as we saw, it is clear that in the intact situation it is the will of the left hemisphere, at a more conscious level, that normally inhibits the will of the right. It would be tempting to suggest that it is also the left hemisphere, on the micro level of millisecond-to-millisecond, that takes the lion’s share of the catch. Indeed some of the experimental evidence does appear to support the view that the majority of right-handed people are biased toward the mode of processing favoured by the left hemisphere, provided the stimulus is so arranged as to give them a choice.28 But other evidence is against it, and it seems that the bias probably gets in at the next level.29

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LEVEL TWO

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So let’s move up from the automatic, moment-to-moment responses of the hemispheres, to consider their relationship in the products of consciousness – at the phenomenological level, where their interaction brings into being our world of experience. At this level it is harder to demonstrate neuropsychological fact, precisely because what we are looking at is not just the interaction of neurones but the phenomenological experience of human beings. This takes place over longer periods than those of the neuronal action potential, and at the highest level of integrated awareness. No one knows where that is, if they wanted to image it, or how to measure its neurological correlates; and it is a process that fluctuates, rather than remaining still in one place at one time to be measured. What happens here has largely to be deduced from what we know of the nature, preoccupations, interests, values and typical modes of operation of the two hemispheres individually, as explored earlier in the book. But all the same some ingenious observations can be, and have been, made.

453

In the discussion of level one, the emphasis was on the necessary inhibition of one hemisphere by the other, since they each need to work separately. However, at a higher level, and over longer time spans, they also need to work together, not just because some important human faculties, such as imagination, appear to depend on the synthesis of the workings of both hemispheres. In the last chapter I described evidence for the primacy of the right hemisphere in constituting our experience of reality, with the need for left hemisphere ‘unfolding’ of what the right hemisphere understands, so that the now unfolded vision can subsequently be reintegrated with the reality of the right hemisphere. I expressed this in terms of Hegel’s Aufhebung, the essential point being that something new, that was not present before, comes into being through the process, not negating the earlier stages, but transforming them.

454

And one of the most significant findings from hemisphere research at the neurological level demonstrates just that. Marie Banich, Director of the Institute of Cognitive Science at Boulder, Colorado, and a leading researcher into hemisphere interaction, writes:

The major finding to come out of our laboratory since the mid-1980s is that interhemispheric interaction is much more than just a mechanism by which one hemisphere ‘photocopies’ experiences and feelings for its partner. Interhemispheric interaction has important emergent functions – functions that cannot be derived from the simple sum of its parts …the nature of processing when both hemispheres are involved cannot be predicted from the parts.30

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30. Banich, 2003, pp. 269–70; Banich & Karol, 1992.

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It is possible to determine which areas of the brain are recruited in order to carry out a task using one hemisphere only, and, by repeating it, this can be determined for each hemisphere on its own. But when both hemispheres co-operate in carrying out the task, it is not just that additional regions come into play, as one might expect, but wholly different regions altogether, many of those that were activated in the single-hemisphere condition remaining inactive, and new areas in different parts of the brain, being recruited.31

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31. Marzi, Perani, Tassinari et al., 1999.

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At a global level we can prefer one or the other hemisphere

But do the hemispheres actually co-operate to bring this situation about? There are some clues at the neurological level to the relationship they have in practice.

It turns out that one or other hemisphere may predominate – its particular cognitive and perceptual style as a whole more greatly influencing our experience of the world – not only during chunks of phenomenological experience (which therefore must last longer than a few milliseconds at a time) but even over very long periods. We can even have, as personalities, characteristic and consistent biases towards one or other hemisphere, certainly for particular kinds of experience, associated with differing degrees of arousal and activation in either hemisphere. This phenomenon is known as ‘hemispheric utilisation bias’ or ‘characteristic perceptual asymmetry’.32

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32. Levy, Heller, Banich et al., 1983; Kim & Levine, 1991, 1992; Kim, Levine & Kertesz, 1990; Levine, Banich & Koch-Weser, 1984; Levy, 1990. See also Boles, 1998, for the view that local perceptual asymmetries are more likely than global ones.

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Some interesting sidelights on the relationship between the hemispheres can be seen by examining the way in which these individual differences affect competition for the control of visual attention. In experiments where a task is carried out requiring attention to one’s non-favoured visual field (the field contralateral to one’s non-favoured hemisphere), while irrelevant, distracting information is presented to the favoured visual field, those subjects with a characteristic left-hemisphere bias found that the already strong tendency for the left hemisphere to prioritise the right visual field, and downplay the left visual field, was enhanced. This meant that the irrelevant information on the right interfered with the task going on in the left visual field (controlled by the right hemisphere). But for those with a characteristic right-hemisphere bias, when conditions were reversed, no such competitive effects were seen: irrelevant information in the right hemisphere’s favoured left visual field did not interfere with the subject’s ability to attend to the matter in hand going on, now, in the right visual field (the field favoured by the left hemisphere).33

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33. Spencer & Banich, 2005.

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This suggests a more even distribution of concern in the right hemisphere than in the left. We know that the right hemisphere ‘looks out’ for both hemispheres’ territory, not just its own, like the left hemisphere. But this goes further: having a ‘utilisation bias’ in favour of the left hemisphere intensifies this effect, whereas having a similar bias in favour of the right hemisphere does nothing to upset the even-handedness of its concern. This resonates with another well-established research finding: that transfer of information from left hemisphere to right hemisphere takes place more slowly than transfer from right to left.34 And, be it noted, this is regardless of whether the task is by nature better suited to the right hemisphere or left hemisphere.35

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34. Marzi, Bisiacchi & Nicoletti, 1991; Bisiacchi, Marzi, Nicoletti et al., 1994; Brown, Larson & Jeeves, 1994; Saron & Davidson, 1989.

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35. Larson & Brown, 1997.

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Competition between the hemispheres is also revealed by the response to injury. If, following a brain injury, one temporarily disables the other (non-injured) hemisphere by, for example, transcranial magnetic stimulation, this causes an improvement in function in the damaged hemisphere.36 Similarly, if the individual should suffer a stroke in the ‘normal’, non-damaged hemisphere, the originally injured hemisphere then improves. This was observed long ago by the distinguished neurophysiologist Brown-Séquard, when he found he was able to reverse a paralysis caused by a lesion in one hemisphere of a frog by inflicting a similar lesion at the same point in the contralateral hemisphere.37 What is more, such interhemispheric competition appears yet again to be asymmetrical, with the suppressive effect of the left hemisphere on the right being greater than that of the right on the left.38

Does this remind you of anything? The finding, perhaps, that once the hemispheres are in touch via the commissures, the left hemisphere is better able to suppress the right than the right is able to suppress the left (see p. 46).

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36. Oliveri, Rossini, Traversa et al., 1999; Vuilleumier, Hester, Assal et al., 1996; Lomber & Payne, 1996; Hilgetag, Théoret & Pascual-Leone, 2001.

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37. Brown-Séquard, 1890.

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38. Kinsbourne, 1993b; Oliveri, Rossini, Traversa et al., 1999.

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Further information comes from individuals with split brains. Though they have some handicaps, they are at an advantage in at least one respect: there are some tasks they can carry out more swiftly than normal subjects.39 For example, tasks involving focussed attention usually engage primarily the left hemisphere. But, in split-brain patients, the left hemisphere cannot so effectively inhibit the right, so that both are able to bring focussed attention (the right hemisphere can also yield focussed attention) to bear and both contribute, with the result that the task is carried out in half the time.

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39. Luck, Hillyard, Mangun et al., 1989, 1994.

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In some cases one can see this pattern of hemisphere competition exemplified in individual brain development following an injury. Subjects with early left-hemisphere brain damage, in whom therefore language has to be accommodated in the right hemisphere alongside the normal right-hemisphere synthetic-Gestalt faculties, show IQ deficits in their non-verbal functions, because the presence of language in the same hemisphere interferes. The direction of influence tends again to be more that of the left hemisphere over the right.

458

What the stories of the split-brain patients in their first few months after operation also reveal is that it is the left hemisphere, Gazzaniga’s interpreter, that is in control, at the conscious level, of the consistent nature of ‘our’ experience, even though we may have differing views, desires, and values in either hemisphere. In inter-manual conflict, it is never the right hand that is experienced as the rebel, the ‘naughty’ hand, the one that is ‘out of control’: it is always the left, that pushes the other way, grabs the wheel, chooses the ‘wrong’ clothes. ‘Of course it is’, you may say: ‘it’s not the right hand that behaves disruptively.’ But disruptive of what? Once the script has been written and the play half performed by the left hemisphere, an incursion from the right hemisphere is bound to be disruptive and unwelcome from its point of view. It’s the left hemisphere, ignorant of what is going on in the right hemisphere, that both decides what it is that ‘I’ want, and then judges any interruption from the right hemisphere as contrary to ‘my’ best interests. But set it in another context, and who knows what might have happened had he actually listened a long while back to his right hemisphere and left his wife rather than embrace her; or – in another patient’s story – had she closed the door, driven the other way, worn the flame-coloured dress? At any rate, at least we can deduce that when she says ‘I know what I want to wear’, she means ‘My left hemisphere knows what it wants me to wear, and I am identified with my left hemisphere.’40

459

From the previous chapter one can see that it is essential that what the left hemisphere yields is returned to the realm of the right hemisphere, where it can once again live. Only the right hemisphere is in touch with primary experience, with life; and the left hemisphere can only ever be a staging post, a processing house, along the route – not the final destination. The right hemisphere certainly needs the left, but the left hemisphere depends on the right.41 Much that marks us out, in the positive sense as well as the negative sense, as human beings requires the intervention of the left hemisphere, as long as it is acting in concert with the right hemisphere. Important human faculties depend on a synthesis of their activity. In the absence of such concerted action, the left hemisphere comes to believe its territory actually is the world.

459

Despite the asymmetry in their roles, in favour of the right hemisphere, there is an important opposing asymmetry of power, in favour of the left hemisphere. The Master makes himself vulnerable to the emissary, and the emissary can choose to take advantage of the situation, to ignore the Master. It seems that its nature is such that it is prone to do so, and it may even, mistakenly, see the right hemisphere’s world as undoing its work, challenging its ‘supremacy’.

459

The image suggests, of course, that the two hemispheres have wills that may not always be in harmony. How legitimate is it to think of the hemispheres as having wills in this sense? Bogen refers to two ‘crucial facts’: that ‘it takes only one hemisphere to have a mind’, and that ‘hemispheres can sustain the activity of two separate spheres of consciousness following commissurotomy’.42 Sperry writes that, in commissurotomy patients,

each hemisphere can be shown to experience its own private sensations, percepts, thoughts, and memories that are inaccessible to awareness in the other hemisphere. Introspective verbal accounts from the vocal left hemisphere report a striking lack of awareness in this hemisphere for mental functions that have just been performed immediately before in the right hemisphere. In this respect each surgically disconnected hemisphere appears to have a mind of its own, but each cut off from, and oblivious to, conscious events in the partner hemisphere.43

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42. Bogen, 1985, p. 38.

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43. Sperry, 1985, pp. 14–15.

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And it is not just like this in surgically disconnected hemispheres. Temporary inactivation of one or other hemisphere, through the Wada test, produces similar results.

Even without such specialised procedures, sometimes the brain of the ordinary subject shows disconnection comparable to that found in split-brain subjects.44 If there are separate sensations, percepts, thoughts and memories, as well as separate ways of dealing with all of these, it would hardly be surprising if there were separate desires formed, separate wills, to each hemisphere – and we know from the split-brain subjects’ experience that this is the case.

460

But we also know from them, as we know from our own experience of divided will, that, despite all this, there can be only one unified field of consciousness. And how is that?

Sperry makes his own attempt to answer this question, and his solution lies in referring to something that must go on at the top end of the process. He writes: ‘The overall, holistic functional effect could thus determine the conscious experience. If the functional impact of the neural activity has a unitary effect in the upper-level conscious dynamics, the subjective experience is unified.’45 In dealing with these issues it is nigh on impossible to remain within the limits of commonly accepted language use, and I make no claim to be able to solve these issues in a way that avoids the traps of language. But I cannot help finding phrases such as ‘the overall, holistic functional effect’ unsatisfactory in explanatory terms. It seems to beg every question – what is it, other than a redescription of what it is trying to explain? And in which hemisphere does it, or ‘the upper-level conscious dynamics’, whatever they may be, lie?

461

It seems to me more fruitful to think of consciousness not as something with sharp edges that is suddenly arrived at once one reaches the very top of mental functioning, but as a process that is gradual, rather than all-or-nothing, and begins low down in the brain, rising up from below the level of the hemispheres, before it reaches the great divide. It may be that the reverse of Sperry’s model applies. The problem then becomes not how two wills can become one unified consciousness, but how one field of consciousness can accommodate two wills. These evolve from the higher cognitive levels, because it is here that different worlds are given to consciousness by each hemisphere, with different sets of values and different experiences. As I move from one situation to another, where different contexts and different sets of values change my preferences, my will changes.

462

Perhaps, then, consciousness is unified at the lowest levels, and it is actually only when the process becomes self-conscious at the topmost levels, within cognition, that the possibility of separation occurs. Here I would quote Jaak Panksepp:

Most forms of intentionality and deep emotional feelings are not split in any obvious way by a parting of the hemispheres. Only the cognitive interpretations [high-level phenomena] of specific events are affected …The unity of an underlying form of consciousness in split-brain individuals, perhaps their fundamental sense of self, is affirmed by the fact that the disconnected hemispheres can no more easily execute two cognitive tasks simultaneously than can the brains of normal individuals.46

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46. Panksepp, 1998, p. 307. See also Lambert, 1991; Pashler, Luck, Hillyard et al., 1994.

462

The ‘fundamental sense of self’ here referred to by Panksepp, the core of the self, is affective and deep-lying: its roots lie at a level below the hemispheric divide, a level, however, with which each cognitively aware hemisphere at the highest level is still in touch. The conflicts that exist are the result of differences between the two hemispheres in high-level cognitive processing, and in most cases they become apparent only when, under special circumstances, care is taken to introduce material to one hemisphere only, and in such a way that it will have no opportunity to descend to a level of the self which can communicate via pathways below the corpus callosum. That would help explain why split-brain patients do not experience any disturbance of the sense of self. So much of our experience, and our sense of our self, comes from low down in the ‘tree’ of consciousness, below hemispheric level: ‘integration’ does not need to be achieved. All the corpus callosum has to do is to help maintain moment-to-moment independence of the hemispheres, not integration of the self. This explains why split-brain patients describe not a fragmentation of the self, but merely some difficulty inhibiting inappropriate conflicts of action.

463

Panksepp sees consciousness as something that begins very deep indeed, in the so-called peri-aqueductal grey matter in the midbrain, and ‘migrates’ through higher regions of the brain, especially the cingulate, temporal and frontal regions of the cortex.47 So he sees it as something that is not all or nothing, but has a continuous existence, transforming itself as it travels upwards, through the branches, to what he calls, by analogy with the forest canopy, the ‘cerebral canopy’, until in the frontal cortices it becomes high-level cognitive awareness.48 I like this image of the cerebral ‘canopy’ because it reminds us that consciousness is not a bird, as it often seems to be in the literature – hovering, detached, coming in at the top level and alighting on the brain somewhere in the frontal lobes – but a tree, its roots deep inside us. It reinforces the nature of consciousness not as an entity, but as a process.49 If, as Thomas Nagel famously put it, consciousness is that which exists ‘when there is something it is like to be that organism’,50 this identifies that the experience of consciousness is not a ‘whatness’, but a ‘howness’ – a ‘what it is like’ – a way of being which distinguishes living things, and is bound to be at least as much a characteristic of the right hemisphere (which is excluded from the process of understanding to the very degree that we are focussed on the issue and bent on analysis) as it is of the left (the hemisphere that does the focussing and analysing).51

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47. Panksepp, 1998, p. 312. See also p. 421, n. 45: ‘There are powerful interconnections between the mesencephalic areas implicated in the generation of the primal SELF and the frontal cortex.’

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48. Panksepp, 1998, p. 314; see also Passingham, 1993; Mantyh, 1982.

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Consciousness is not the same as inwardness, although there can be no inwardness without consciousness. To return to Patricia Churchland’s statement that it is reasonable to identify the blueness of an object with its disposition to scatter electromagnetic waves preferentially at about 0.46µm,52 to see it like this, as though from the outside, excluding the ‘subjective’ experience of the colour blue – as though to get the inwardness of consciousness out of the picture – requires a very high degree of consciousness and self-consciousness. The polarity between the ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ points of view is a creation of the left hemisphere’s analytic disposition. In reality there can be neither absolutely, only a choice between a betweenness which acknowledges itself, and one which denies its own nature. By identifying blueness solely with the behaviour of electromagnetic particles one is not avoiding value, not avoiding betweenness, not avoiding one’s shadow being cast across the picture. One is using the inwardness of consciousness in a very specialised way to strive to empty itself as much as possible of value, of the self. The paradoxical result is an extremely partial, fragmented version of the colour blue, which is neither value-free nor independent of the self’s disposition towards its object.

465

One of the difficulties in practising philosophy is that we are obliged to bring into the focus of our attention, and therefore make explicit, processes which by their nature are not focussed on, and cannot be made explicit. Any attempt to do so immediately and radically alters what we find. Wittgenstein repeatedly remarks on the way that stopping acting and engaging with the world in order to reflect on it makes things appear alien – we feel ‘the phenomenon is slipping away from us’ (see p. 89 above). Thus his thrust as a philosopher is to help us get on with things, to ‘move about around things and events in the world instead of trying to delineate their essential features’53 – in other words, to be skilled participants in the life of the world as it flows (right hemisphere), not detached analysts of the process once it stops (left hemisphere). Whether this might undermine the practice of philosophy altogether is a question of which Wittgenstein was, of course, also highly aware.

466

This has profound implications for our attempts to pin down what consciousness is, since such attempts always and necessarily bring to bear high levels of self-awareness which induce a reflexive condition different from consciousness as understood intuitively. Panksepp, who has written on the subject from the standpoint of a neuroscientist, sees consciousness as ultimately affective in nature, and founded on ‘motor processes that generate self-consciousness by being closely linked to body image representations’ – in other words, we are first and foremost aware of ourselves through feeling states that lead to action in, and engagement with, the world as embodied beings. He rejects the view that consciousness arises from sensory-perceptual imagery, according to the prevailing cognitive model, based as it is on what we find when we stop acting in the world and introspect on our own thought processes. ‘Consciousness’, he writes, ‘is not simply a sensory-perceptual affair, a matter of mental imagery, as the contents of our mind would have us believe. It is deeply enmeshed with the brain mechanisms that automatically promote action readiness.’54

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51. ‘[T]he analogical form of the English expression “what is it like?” is misleading. It does not mean “what (in our experience) it resembles”, but rather “how it is for the subject himself” ‘ (Nagel, 1979b, p. 170, n. 6).

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50. Nagel, 1979b, p. 166.

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54. Panksepp, 1998, p. 303.

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I know that it does not necessarily feel as if the sense of the self comes from lower levels of the nervous system. But I do not think it would ‘feel’ any different if it did or didn’t. The problem is that when we are trying to introspect on ourselves we change the nature of what we are looking at. Our active, embodied engagement with the world is a skill. It is something we learn before we are conscious of it, and consciousness threatens to disrupt it, as it disrupts all skills. In fact what one means by a skill is something intuitive and non-explicit. We do not work out what actions we need to make in order to hammer effectively, and then give instructions consciously to our hands and arms to carry them out in a certain order, with myriads of caveats and qualifications – ‘If the hammer glances off too much to the right, aim slightly further to the left; if this does not work, try using slightly less force,’ and so on. If we did, we would hammer very badly: instead we just pick up the hammer and strike. As Dreyfus, a Heidegger scholar who has written powerfully about the problems of trying to ‘operationalise’ skills, particularly more complex skills that require considerable experience, points out, we resort to explicit analysis of the process only when we introspect on what happened – either because something has gone wrong, or because we are complete beginners. Philosophers and psychologists who champion the view that our mental processes are akin to those of a computer ‘have yet to notice that we only become aware of our skills when things are not going smoothly or when someone performing an experiment has given us a task in which we have no prior experience or skill. Then we are indeed dependent on analysis.’55

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55. Dreyfus & Dreyfus, 1986, pp. 147–8.

468

Which brings us back to the question of whether ‘consciousness is in the left hemisphere’. Obviously much depends on what is meant by ‘conscious’, and if consciousness is a continuum, it will necessarily be impossible to be clear-cut about it – in fact supposing it to be a clear-cut phenomenon would be one sign of being off track. The most robust distinction that can be made, however, although it is itself far from unproblematic, is that between self-consciousness and consciousness ‘pure and simple’. But what is consciousness without self-consciousness? We cannot tell whether another creature has self-consciousness – or, strictly, consciousness at all – so we are obliged to introspect on our own experience. However, such introspection is by definition self-conscious, and so we will not get to know what it is like to be conscious without being self-conscious by this route, either. One can however distinguish between times when one is aware of oneself as the object of attention and times when one is simply aware of being. This is the closest I can get to the distinction. It has the double advantage of coinciding with what we normally mean by ‘self-consciousness’ in everyday parlance; and of pinpointing the abnormality in subjects whose psychopathology, as in many anxiety disorders, especially social phobia, is of excessive self-consciousness. Sufferers describe an uncomfortable sense of being observed, even of there being an ‘eye’ that observes their ‘I’ (in the world of schizophrenia this process becomes psychotic, and is experienced as a reality; see Plate 1). Such self-consciousness also has the paralysing effect of rendering awkward and artificial the skills of ordinary social life which have to remain intuitive and unconscious to be effective; so one of the aspects of self-consciousness is the dragging into the centre of awareness of what should remain outside of it.

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Most, if not all, of the ‘functions’ mediated by the right hemisphere fall into this category of what has to remain outside the focus of awareness – implicit, intuitive, unattended to. And so it looks as though self-consciousness, at least, comes about when the left hemisphere is engaged in inspecting the life of the right. As far as the right hemisphere activities themselves go, we are conscious most of the time when carrying them out, but we are not focussed on them, and therefore not conscious of them – the attention is somewhere else (and they can come and go from consciousness, depending on what else is going on).56 Many over-learned routines, such as driving a familiar route, are like this. At the time we are not aware of carrying them out, but we would become so immediately if our attention were drawn to it – or if we made a mistake.57 Many over-learned and routine behaviours must involve the left hemisphere. So clearly not everything in the left hemisphere can be – or ever could have been – in the focus of attention. For one thing, that focus is very small; and, for another, very little of the left hemisphere can be near the top of the cerebral canopy, where awareness mainly is.

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The idea that self-consciousness, in the sense of being aware of ourselves doing or being something, is the left hemisphere inspecting the right is supported by a number of observations. The attentional ‘spotlight’, as we have seen, is a function of the left hemisphere. The casualties in self-consciousness are all right-hemisphere-based, social or empathic skills. And schizophrenic subjects, whose psychopathology depends on a reflexive hyperconsciousness, and who often depict a detached observing eye in their paintings, show a relative hypofunction of the right hemisphere in relation to the left (see Plate 2).

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More specifically, the idea that things come into being through an apophatic process (see p. 197) also casts light, I believe, on the problem of the self, and helps to confirm this view. Hume introspected and found no sign of the self, just a string of sense impressions. Fichte thought that was quite natural. The self, he believed, would not emerge in cognition: the more absorbed you are in the process of attending, the less aware you are of yourself as the absorber. It is only when there is some kind of resistance that one becomes aware of the self, ‘not as an object but as that which is obtruded upon by some kind of recalcitrant reality’.58 This is as if things become, in Heidegger’s terms, vorhanden, separate from us, and we feel ourselves separate from them. In Merleau-Ponty’s terms, it has to do with the plane of focus: whether the ‘I’ is transparent or opaque. I come into being as a self through the experience of resistance, as a lake is bounded by the shore which makes it a lake. These associations with opacity and Vorhandenheit again suggest that the self-conscious self emerges only when the focus of left-hemisphere attention is brought to bear on the right-hemisphere world.

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58. I. Berlin, 1999, p. 94.

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What about those who have suffered a left-hemisphere stroke? Clearly they remain conscious. The degree to which they remain self-conscious is harder to assess because of the difficulty of reporting on it in an articulate fashion. It is not impossible to imagine ways of circumventing this problem, however, though I am not aware of research addressing the point. I would be surprised if self-consciousness were altogether lacking, and it may be that, if the tree cannot reach the forest canopy on one side of the fence, it will push up on the other in an attempt to do so, with possibly paradoxical results that those who have had left-hemisphere strokes may be more, rather than less, self-conscious, because of the damaging effect of having the attentional spotlight in the same hemisphere as all those things that by their nature need to flee from it; rather as those with left-hemisphere brain damage in childhood develop poorer right-hemisphere skills because of the presence in the same hemisphere of language, with its Gorgon stare.

Panksepp’s vision of consciousness as a process that begins in the midbrain and migrates upwards also suggests a possible approach to the so-called binding problem, which refers to the difficulty of knowing how the various modular elements of brain function come to be united in the experience of the self – where in, or by what part of, the brain do the various modules that are identified by cognitive psychology get to be unified?

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One answer to this is epistemological: that this is largely a problem created by the model of mind we have espoused. Derived inevitably from the self-conscious, self-reflexive mechanisms of the left hemisphere, our examination of ourselves identifies the parts of a living whole, then wonders how the parts can be put together (the Frankenstein’s monster problem). But Panksepp’s vision gives a neurological answer to this problem: what look like ‘modules’ are better seen as branches of a tree – except that, in this tree, Spanish moss also hangs between the branches.

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Ramachandran describes experiments which

flatly contradict the theory that the brain consists of a number of autonomous modules acting as a bucket brigade. Popularised by artificial intelligence researchers, the idea that the brain behaves like a computer, with each module performing a highly specialised job and sending its output to the next module, is widely believed …But my experiments …have taught me that this is not how the brain works. Its connections are extraordinarily labile and dynamic. Perceptions emerge as a result of reverberations of signals between different levels of the sensory hierarchy, indeed across different senses.59

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59. Ramachandran, 2005, p. 56.

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Experience is not just a stitching together, at the topmost level, of Gazzaniga’s ‘patchwork’ of functions. Experience is already coherent in its wholeness at very low levels in the brain, and what higher levels do is not to put together bits (left-hemisphere fashion) but to permit the growth of a unified whole (right hemisphere fashion). There are known to be highly complex, and complexly interconnected, cortico-subcortical loops involving the basal ganglia, deep-lying nuclei in the brain, way below the corpus callosum, which, as we understand more about them, we realize increasingly are involved, not just in motor co-ordination, as we used to think, but in both the segregation and the integration of motor, affective and cognitive functions. These ‘loops’ underlie subtle, emotionally laden aspects of experience. Although the cognitive, motor and affective elements are carefully segregated, even within the subthalamic nuclei – relay centres that are minute (only 5–15 mm in diameter) – they are also equally carefully interconnected (even at this very low level there is division within union). The processes that are subserved are learned, but have become nonetheless automatic, not under conscious control. Patients with conditions such as Parkinson’s disease can now be treated by a procedure known as deep brain stimulation, which involves surgically implanting electrodes in the subthalamic nuclei and stimulating them for brief periods (a painless procedure that is carried out, and indeed must be carried out, with the patient fully conscious). Professor Yves Agid and his team at the Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris found that by minute variation in the position of the electrode, they caused a patient to change from the impassive, immobile, ‘switched-off’ Parkinsonian state, to one of severe depression. In video recordings their patient can be seen grimacing, holding her head in her hands, and expressing feelings of sadness, guilt, uselessness, and hopelessness: ‘I’m falling down in my head, I no longer wish to live, to see anything, hear anything, feel anything …’ When asked why she was crying and if she felt pain, she responded: ‘No, I’m fed up with life, I’ve had enough …I don’t want to live any more, I’m disgusted with life …Everything is useless …worthless: I’m scared in this world.’ When asked why she was sad, she replied: ‘I’m tired. I want to hide in a corner …I’m crying over myself, of course …I’m hopeless, why am I bothering you …’ Less than 90 seconds after stimulation was stopped, the depression disappeared. For the next five minutes she was in a mildly hypomanic state, laughing and joking with the examiner, and playfully pulling his tie. By moving the probe minutely, she became frankly hypomanic, appearing not just cheerful, but being ‘over the moon’, and restlessly active – all within minutes or seconds.60

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Experience that is completely ‘fused’ or unified in its automatic recruitment of cognitive, emotional and motor aspects of being, and which is experienced at the highest phenomenological level as an integrated phenomenon, with thoughts about the uselessness of carrying on living, feelings of deep sadness and gestures of despair, is already coherently constituted (and ‘ready to go’) at this low level in the tree of consciousness. It is not as if moving the electrode caused incoherent experience, such as the motor restrictions of Parkinson’s disease, with the cognitions of mania and the affect of depression, parts without relationship that would need to await the highest levels of cortical function for integration. Experiential wholes, that are completely coherent across all realms, and affect us at the most conscious as well as unconscious levels, are already present well below consciousness.

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LEVEL THREE

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To recap. More than one will (and a fortiori more than one set of goals or values) does not mean more than one consciousness: so with one consciousness we can have more than one will, expressive of more than one aim. In Chapters 2 to 4, I suggested that the two hemispheres, as two vast coherent neurological systems, each capable of sustaining consciousness on their own, do have different concerns, goals and values, and that these are therefore likely to be expressed in different wills; and in this chapter I have put forward evidence suggesting that a conflict of wills may be exactly what we find. In Chapter 5, I showed that on a range of both philosophical and neuropsychological grounds the right hemisphere has primacy, and that, though the left hemisphere has a valuable role, its products need to be returned to the realm of the right hemisphere and once more integrated into a new whole, greater than the sum of its parts. Earlier in this chapter I showed that on the first, millisecond-to-millisecond, level, the most obvious fact about the relationship between the hemispheres is that it depends on separation and mutual inhibition, which is coherent with the view of the relationship between the phenomenological worlds of the two hemispheres, according to which each must, for different reasons, remain ignorant of the other. At the second level, that of their more global interaction over longer time periods that form the basis of conscious experience, the evidence is that the relationship is not symmetrical or reciprocal, with the advantage being taken by the left hemisphere.

There is therefore a conflict of asymmetries.

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Ontological asymmetry

In favour of the right hemisphere there is what might be called ontological asymmetry (the primacy of the right hemisphere’s interaction with whatever exists). The right hemisphere is the primary mediator of experience, from which the conceptualised, re-presented world of the left hemisphere derives, and on which it depends. Because, as Blake says, ‘Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy’ (energy being something like Scheler’s Drang), which, as he puts it, ‘is the only Life, and comes from the Body’, the left hemisphere does not itself have life, such life as it appears to have coming from reconnecting with the body, emotion and experience through the right hemisphere. It is this primacy of the (right-hemisphere-mediated) interaction with the lived world beyond ourselves over our (left-hemisphere-mediated) re-presentation of it that lies behind Goethe’s inversion of the Johannine pronouncement: ‘In the beginning was the word [logos].’ In the mouth of Faust it becomes: ‘Im Anfang war die Tat!’ (‘In the beginning was the deed’).61

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Asymmetry of function

Also in favour of the right hemisphere is an asymmetry of function, which follows from the first asymmetry. In the functioning together of the two hemispheres, the products of the left hemisphere need to be returned to the realm of the right hemisphere in order to live. While experience is enriched by the opposite process, whereby the products of the right hemisphere are sent to the left hemisphere for ‘unpacking’, there is no necessity for that process. One process is literally vital: the other is not.

These two asymmetries indicate where the interhemispheric balance of power ought to lie, and indeed needs to lie: with the right hemisphere. But it does not. There are three other asymmetries which mean that in fact the balance of power is doomed to be dangerously skewed towards the lesser hemisphere, the left. These are an ‘asymmetry of means’, ‘asymmetry of structure’ and ‘asymmetry of interaction’.

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Asymmetry of means

The left hemisphere point of view inevitably dominates, because it is most accessible: closest to the self-aware, self-inspecting intellect. Conscious experience is at the focus of our attention, usually therefore dominated by the left hemisphere. It benefits from an asymmetry of means. The means of argument – the three Ls, language, logic and linearity – are all ultimately under left-hemisphere control, so that the cards are heavily stacked in favour of our conscious discourse enforcing the world view re-presented in the hemisphere which speaks, the left hemisphere, rather than the world that is present to the right hemisphere. Its point of view is always easily defensible, because analytic; the difficulty lies with those who are aware that this does not exhaust the possibilities, and have nonetheless to use analytic methods to transcend analysis. It is also most easily expressible, because of language’s lying in the left hemisphere: it has a voice. But the laws of non-contradiction, and of the excluded middle, which have to rule in the left hemisphere because of the way it construes the nature of the world, do not hold sway in the right hemisphere, which construes the world as inherently giving rise to what the left hemisphere calls paradox and ambiguity. This is much like the problem of the analytic versus holistic understanding of what a metaphor is: to one hemisphere a perhaps beautiful, but ultimately irrelevant, lie; to the other the only path to truth.

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But even that fact, significant as it is, does not convey the true scale of the distinction, which concerns not just the functional differences at a moment in time, but what happens over much longer periods in the ordinary human brain. The left hemisphere builds systems, where the right does not. It therefore allows elaboration of its own workings over time into systematic thought which gives it permanence and solidity, and I believe these have even become instantiated in the external world around us, inevitably giving it a massive advantage (see Chapter 12). There is something very suggestive about the fact that the predominance of the left hemisphere may result from there being – possibly there having been engineered? – a deficit in the right hemisphere.

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Let’s look first at the way in which the two hemispheres try to know, to get a grasp on the world. Using the familiar information-processing terminology, the left hemisphere favours analytic, sequential ‘processing’, where the right hemisphere favours parallel ‘processing’ of different streams of ‘information’ simultaneously. This is what I have expressed as the left hemisphere’s way of building up a picture slowly but surely, piece by piece, brick on brick. One thing is established as (apparently) certain; that forms a platform for adding the next little bit of (apparent) certainty. And so on. The right hemisphere meanwhile tries to take in all the various aspects of what it approaches at once. No part in itself precedes any other: it is more like the way a picture comes into focus – there is an ‘aha!’ moment when the whole suddenly breaks free and comes to life before us. For it, though, knowledge comes through a relationship, a betweenness, a back and forth reverberative process between itself and the Other, and is therefore never finished, never certain.

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There is a huge disadvantage for the right hemisphere here. If this knowledge has to be conveyed to someone else, it is in fact essential to be able to offer (apparent) certainties: to be able to repeat the process for the other person, build it up from the bits. That kind of knowledge can be handed on, because it is not ‘my’ knowledge. It is knowledge (Wissenschaft), not knowledge (Erkenntnis). By contrast, passing on what the right hemisphere knows requires the other party already to have an understanding of it, which can be awakened in them; if they have no such knowledge, they will be easily seduced into thinking that the left hemisphere’s kind of knowledge is a substitute.

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Sequential analytic ‘processing’ also makes the left hemisphere the hemisphere par excellence of sequential discourse, and that gives it the most extraordinary advantage in being heard. It is like being the Berlusconi of the brain, a political heavyweight who has control of the media. Speech is possible from the right hemisphere, but it is usually very limited. We have seen that thought probably originates in the right hemisphere, but the left hemisphere has most syntax and most of the lexicon, which makes it very much the controller of the ‘word’ in general. Coupled with its preference for classification, analysis and sequential thinking, this makes it very powerful in constructing an argument. By contrast it is hard for the right hemisphere to be heard at all: what it knows is too complex, hasn’t the advantage of having been carved up into pieces that can be neatly strung together, and it hasn’t got a voice anyway.

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Asymmetry of structure

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And then there is an asymmetry of structure. There is an asymmetry inherent in this system building, namely the difficulty of escape from a self-enclosed system. The system itself closes off any possible escape mechanisms. The existence of a system of thought dependent on language automatically devalues whatever cannot be expressed in language; the process of reasoning discounts whatever cannot be reached by reasoning. In everyday life we may be willing to accept the existence of a reality beyond language or rationality, but we do so because our mind as a whole can intuit that aspects of our experience lie beyond either of these closed systems. But in its own terms there is no way that language can break out of the world language creates – except by allowing language to go beyond itself in poetry; just as in its own terms rationality cannot break out of rationality, to an awareness of the necessity of something else, something other than itself, to underwrite its existence – except by following Gödel’s logic to its conclusion. Language in itself (to this extent the post-modern position is correct) can only refer to itself, and reason can only elaborate, ‘unpack’ the premises it starts with. But there can be no evidence within reason that yields the premises from which reason must begin, or that validates the process of reasoning itself – those premises, and the leap of faith in favour of reason, have to come from behind and beyond, from intuition or experience.62

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Once the system is set up it operates like a hall of mirrors in which we are reflexively imprisoned. Leaps of faith from now on are strictly out of bounds. Yet it is only whatever can ‘leap’ beyond the world of language and reason that can break out of the imprisoning hall of mirrors and reconnect us with the lived world. And the evidence is that this unwillingness to allow escape is not just a passive process, an ‘involuntary’ feature of the system, but one that appears willed by the left hemisphere. The history of the last 100 years particularly, as I shall attempt to convey in Part II, contains many examples of the left hemisphere’s intemperate attacks on nature, art, religion and the body, the main routes to something beyond its power. In other words its behaviour looks suspiciously tyrannical – the Master’s emissary become a tyrant.

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The left hemisphere, with its rational system-building, makes possible the will to action; it believes it is the one that makes things happen, even makes things live. But nothing in us, actively or positively, make things live – all we can do is permit, or not permit, life, which already exists. It may still seem difficult to understand how a set of relations that are predicated, as I would agree with Scheler (and for that matter with Heidegger) that they are, on negation – the power to say ‘no’ or not say ‘no’ – can prove to have life and be creative. It seems obvious to the left hemisphere, which is all that we have to ‘think’ (reason) with, and which remains ignorant of what the right hemisphere knows, that creation must be the result of something positive it does. It makes things, as it makes things happen, and it thinks it gives life to them. In this it is like a cat pushing a dead mouse about the floor in order to see it move. But we do not have the power to make things live: like the cat, we can only either permit life, or not permit it.

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This idea is not as strange, however – or as unusual in the history of philosophy – as it may seem. The act of creation may be one of invention, not in the modern sense of the word, but in its older sense: one of discovery, of finding something that was there, but required liberation into being. The word invention used to mean discovery (Latin invenire, to find), and it is only since the seventeenth century that the word has come to take on the grandiose sense of something we make, rather than something we uncover. Un-covering, or ‘dis-covering’, has built into the very word the act of negation, of saying ‘no’ to something that conceals. It was Spinoza who first made the point that omnis determinatio est negatio – ‘all determination [in the sense of the bringing into sharper focus of anything] is negation’. And Hegel, who is here, as so often, in the forefront of modern philosophy, emphasised the creative importance of negation. But the idea is familiar to mainstream science. The Popperian criteria for truth incorporate the notion that we can never prove something to be true; all we can do is prove that the alternatives are untrue.

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The feeling we have of experience happening – that even if we stop doing anything and just sit and stare, time is still passing, our bodies are changing, our senses are picking up sights and sounds, smells and tactile sensations, and so on – is an expression of the fact that life comes to us. Whatever it is out there that exists apart from us comes into contact with us as the water falls on a particular landscape. The water falls and the landscape resists. One can see a river as restlessly searching out its path across the landscape, but in fact no activity is taking place in the sense that there is no will involved. One can see the landscape as blocking the path of the water so that it has to turn another way, but again the water just falls in the way that water has to, and the landscape resists its path, in the way it has to. The result of the amorphous water and the form of the landscape is a river.

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The river is not only passing across the landscape, but entering into it and changing it too, as the landscape has ‘changed’ and yet not changed the water. The landscape cannot make the river. It does not try to put a river together. It does not even say ‘yes’ to the river. It merely says ‘no’ to the water – or does not say ‘no’ to the water, and, by its not saying ‘no’ to the water, wherever it is that it does so, it allows the river to come into being. The river does not exist before the encounter. Only water exists before the encounter, and the river actually comes into being in the process of encountering the landscape, with its power to say ‘no’ or not say ‘no’. Similarly there is ‘whatever it is that exists apart from ourselves’, but ‘whatever it is that exists’ only comes to be what it is as it finds out in the encounter with ourselves what it is, and we only find out and make ourselves what we are in our encounter with ‘whatever it is that exists’.

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A problem of time emerges. There is in all descriptions, that are, after all, re-presentations, the problem that they begin with something known. They then build on what is known with something else that is known. These could be words or mental images (like photographs, what the French call clichés – fixed, fragmented, two-dimensional). Thus it is that we have the illusion of something being brought into being by being put together. All language is inevitably like this: it substitutes for the experienced ambiguity and uncertainty of the original encounter with something in the process of coming into being, a sequence of apparently fixed, certain pieces of information. Information is by definition something fixed, a bunch of facts as we put it. But all the conscious mind can do when it has a bunch of pieces is put the pieces together to try to make something. However, this is no more a way of actually re-enabling the experience itself than living beings are made by stitching together the limbs. Thus the apparent sequence of things causing one another in time is an artefact of the left-hemisphere way of viewing the world. In creation we are not actively putting together something we already know, but finding something which is coming into being through our knowing, at the same time that our knowing depends on its coming into being; as Pushkin says of Evgeny Onegin, in the middle of the work itself, that he did not know where it was going, it was an unfinished path, a journey, an exploration, of whatever it was that was coming into being between himself and the imaginative world.

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Asymmetry of interaction

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Finally there is an asymmetry of interaction. It seems to me that the overall way in which the hemispheres relate has critically shifted from a form of what might be called stable dynamic equilibrium to an inequilibrium. When there are two necessary but mutually opposed entities in operation together, an imbalance in favour of one can, and often will, be corrected by a shift in favour of the other – a swing of the pendulum. But negative feedback can become positive feedback, and in the left hemisphere there is an inbuilt tendency for it to do so.63 To return to the image of the pendulum, it would be as if a violent swing of the pendulum shifted the whole clock, which then over-balanced. I believe that we have entered a phase of cultural history in which negative feedback between the products of action of the two hemispheres has given way to positive feedback in favour of the left hemisphere. Despite the primacy of the right hemisphere, it is the left hemisphere that has all the cards and, from this standpoint, looks set to win the game. That is the subject of Part II.

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What light does Heidegger cast on the interaction of the hemispheres? According to Heidegger, what were anciently seen as the Apollonian, more rationalistic, and Dionysian, more intuitive, aspects of our being have become grossly unbalanced. Nietzsche claimed that the constant opposition between these two very different tendencies led to a fruitful incitement to further and ever higher levels of life and creativity (which accords with the evidence of the relationship between the two hemispheres at its best). War, as Heraclitus said, is the father of all things. But the war between these tendencies has become, according to Heidegger, no longer creative but merely destructive. We have become ‘pre-eminently endowed with the ability to grasp and delimit’: the Apollonian has triumphed at the expense of the Dionysian. We are caught up, he believed, in a frenzy of ‘forming projects, enclosures, frameworks, division and structuring’, destroying ourselves and our environment and turning all into ‘resource’, something to be merely exploited, Nature turned into ‘one gigantic filling station’, as he once graphically put it.64 This is the opposite of the problem the Greeks confronted, for whom the balance lay more towards the Dionysian, and who therefore strove, and needed to strive, towards the Apollonian.

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64. Heidegger, 1966, p. 50.

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However, from within Heidegger’s own philosophy there emerge grounds to suppose that the situation is not beyond remedy. He quoted with approval Hölderlin’s lines: Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst / Das Rettende auch (‘Where there is danger, that which will save us also grows’). How I understand this in relation to the brain is this.

At the first level, it tells us something about the constant, relatively stable, interrelation of the hemispheres at their best. In a way it is Nietzsche’s point about the fruitful relation of the Apollonian and Dionysian. Within the realm of the left hemisphere (‘where there is danger’) there is also the possibility of an ‘unfolding’ of what is implicit, which, if returned to the right hemisphere, will lead to something greater and better coming forward (‘that which will save us’). This sounds very abstract, but I think it can be made clearer by an example. If we subject a work of art, say, or even the human body, to detached, analytic attention, we lose the sense of the thing itself, and its being in all its wholeness and otherness recedes. But the result of such attention, provided it is then relinquished, so that we stand in a state of openness and receptivity before the thing once again, may be a deeper and richer ‘presencing’. The work of the left hemisphere done, the thing ‘returns’ to the right hemisphere positively enriched. The best criticism of works of art produces just this result, and the study of medicine at its best achieves it, too, in relation to the human body. Again it is the analogy of the necessary analysis carried out by the pianist in learning a piece, an analysis that must be forgotten during performance. The ‘danger’ inherent in the process is the potential arrogance of the left hemisphere, which may not allow the return: it may come to think of itself as all in all.

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The left hemisphere can play a vital, irreplaceable role if only it can be restored to its rightful place, and allow itself to be readopted by the right hemisphere. The left hemisphere is a crucial part of the creative process – the unfolding of potential. Becoming is potential, and for Being to emerge from Becoming, it needs to be ‘collapsed’ into the present, as the wave function ‘collapses’ under observation, and Schrödinger’s cat becomes either dead or alive – the terms on which we exist. But it needs nonetheless to hand its work back to the right hemisphere. It is only out of the unity of division and unity that a new unity comes: so unity melds with its opposite and yet becomes more itself. (It is not, per contra, true that out of the unity of division and unity a new division comes, nor is it true that out of the division of unity and division a new division comes: by remaining divided nothing new comes at all.)

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At the second level, it has something to say about the particular danger of the modern world view, in which the hemispheres are, I believe, out of kilter. A state of fallenness, which Heidegger called Verfallen, is according to him an inevitable part of existence. But there is a sense in which, as Heidegger believed, this has its positive too, since the very existence of Verfallen prompts Dasein to awareness of the loss of its authentic self, and to strive harder towards what is authentic. This process is inevitably one of cycles or alternations of direction. The sense of longing and striving for something beyond, which otherwise we could not achieve, is an idea I will return to in Part II, where I will consider the influence of the divided brain on Western culture. In the unfolding story I tell, the left hemisphere comes to be more and more powerful: at the same time problems grow.

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CODA: SLEEPWALKING INTO THE ABYSS

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Right from his twenties until his death, in the year 1832, at the age of eighty-two, Goethe was obsessed with the legend of Faustus, and worked on what was to become his ultimate epic masterpiece, the long dramatic poem Faust, all his life. The legend of Faustus, the learned doctor who, frustrated by the bounds of his knowledge and power, makes a pact with the devil to increase them without limit while he lives, the price of which is his immortal soul, lies deep in the German psyche, and versions of the story go back to the Middle Ages. The myth is clearly a warning against hubris. In Goethe’s version of the story, Faust is an essentially good man, who has already done much for others through his skills as a physician, before his lust for power and knowledge lead him to do many destructive things. Yet, although Faust comes in the end to realise that there are indeed limits to what humanity can understand or achieve, he is brought back, through his own pain and remorse, to an awareness of the good his knowledge can bring to others: his ultimate moment of happiness, the purpose of his bargain with Mephistopheles, comes through his realisation of what he can do for humanity, not for himself. At the end of the work, God, not the devil, takes his soul; in doing so he acknowledges the truly great value of Faust’s endless striving. In this version of the myth, it seems to me, the right hemisphere’s desire for understanding something further and beyond and the left hemisphere’s means for helping achieve that end – the Master and his emissary working in concert – are seen as ultimately redeemed and redeeming.65 More explicitly Goethe wrote in midlife a poem, Der Zauberlehrling (The Sorcerer’s Apprentice), the story of which is familiar to most people from Disney’s Fantasia, but in which the returning sorcerer – to whom Goethe refers as der alte Meister, the old master – is not angry with the foolish apprentice who thought he could do on his own what his master did, but merely bids him understand that he, the Master, alone can conjure spirits safely. If the left hemisphere is hot-headed and rivalrous, the right hemisphere is not: it has an accurate appreciation of what its companion can offer.

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65. According to Max Planck, the aim of science – knowledge – ‘is an incessant struggle towards a goal which can never be reached. Because the goal is of its very nature unattainable. It is something that is essentially metaphysical and as such is always again and again beyond each achievement… . it is just this striving forward that brings us to the fruits which are always falling into our hands and which are the unfailing sign that we are on the right road and that we are ever and ever drawing nearer to our journey’s end. But that journey’s end will never be reached, because it is always the still far thing that glimmers in the distance and is unattainable. It is not the possession of truth, but the success which attends the seeking after it, that enriches the seeker and brings happiness to him. This is an acknowledgment made long ago by thinkers of deepest insight …’ (Planck, 1933, p. 83).

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But in either story – that of Faust or of the apprentice – there is a saving awareness that things have gone badly wrong. In the story I am to tell, the left hemisphere acts like a sorcerer’s apprentice that is blithely unaware that he is about to drown, a Faust that has no insight into his errors and the destruction they have brought about.

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Let us remind ourselves of the neurological literature for a moment. Although the left hemisphere does not see and cannot understand what the right hemisphere understands, it is expert at pretending that it does, at finding quite plausible, but bogus, explanations for the evidence that does not fit its version of events. It will be remembered from the experiments of Deglin and Kinsbourne that the left hemisphere would rather believe authority, ‘what it says on this piece of paper’, than the evidence of its own senses. And remember how it is willing to deny a paralysed limb, even when it is confronted with indisputable evidence? Ramachandran puts the problem with his customary vividness:

In the most extreme cases, a patient will not only deny that the arm (or leg) is paralysed, but assert that the arm lying in the bed next to him, his own paralysed arm, doesn’t belong to him! There’s an unbridled willingness to accept absurd ideas.

But when the damage is to the left hemisphere (and the sufferer is therefore depending on the right hemisphere), with paralysis on the body’s right side,

they almost never experience denial. Why not? They are as disabled and frustrated as people with right hemisphere damage, and presumably there is as much ‘need’ for psychological defence, but in fact they are not only aware of the paralysis, but constantly talk about it …It is the vehemence of the denial – not a mere indifference to paralysis – that cries out for an explanation.66

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66. Ramachandran, 2005, pp. 131–2 (emphasis added).

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Again Nietzsche had the measure of it: ‘“I have done that”, says my [veridical episodic right-hemisphere] memory. “I cannot have done that”—says my pride [theory-driven, denial-prone left-hemisphere], and remains adamant. At last—memory yields.’67

The left hemisphere is not keen on taking responsibility. If the defect might reflect on the self, it does not like to accept it. But if something or someone else can be made to take responsibility – if it is a ‘victim’ of someone else’s wrongdoing, in other words – it is prepared to do so. Ramachandran carried out an experiment in which a patient with denial of a left arm paralysis received an injection of harmless salt water that she was told would ‘paralyse’ her (in reality already paralysed) left arm. Once her left hemisphere had someone else to blame for it, it was prepared to accept the existence of the paralysis.68

Ramachandran again: ‘The left hemisphere is a conformist, largely indifferent to discrepancies, whereas the right hemisphere is the opposite: highly sensitive to perturbation.’69 Denial, a tendency to conformism, a willingness to disregard the evidence, a habit of ducking responsibility, a blindness to mere experience in the face of the overwhelming evidence of theory: these might sound ominously familiar to observers of contemporary Western life.

A sort of stuffing of the ears with sealing wax appears to be part of the normal left-hemisphere mode. It does not want to hear what it takes to be the siren songs of the right hemisphere, recalling it to what has every right – indeed, a greater right, as I have argued – to be called reality. It is as though, blindly, the left hemisphere pushes on, always along the same track. Evidence of failure does not mean that we are going in the wrong direction, only that we have not gone far enough in the direction we are already headed.

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67. Nietzsche, 1973, §68, p. 72.

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68. Ramachandran, 2005, p. 151.

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The left hemisphere as a sleepwalker

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The popular assumption, aided by the reflections of some respectable neuroscientists, is that the right hemisphere might be something like a zombie, or a sleepwalker. It seems to be supposed naïvely that the defining quality of the zombie, that quintessentially uncanny phenomenon, is the lack of the verbalising and rationalising intelligence exemplified by the left hemisphere.

In Chapter 10 I will deal with the phenomenon of the uncanny, of the zombie and its like, phenomena that started to figure in literature, oddly but significantly enough, in the Enlightenment. I will suggest that the uncanny looks extraordinarily like certain aspects of the world according to the left hemisphere, in which vitality is absent, and the human is forced to approximate to the mechanical. Zombies have much in common with Frankenstein’s monster, after all. They perform like computer simulations of the human. There is no life in their eyes. And Giovanni Stanghellini has explored with subtlety, in his book Disembodied Spirits and Deanimated Bodies, the way in which the ‘zombie’ state is mimicked by schizophrenia, a largely right-hemisphere-deficit condition.70

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70. Stanghellini, 2004.

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69. ibid., p. 141; and see Fink, Marshall, Halligan et al., 1999b.

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So-called ‘zombie’ states are characterised by dissociation, in which the conscious mind appears cut off from the body and from feeling. That in itself suggests a relative hypofunction of the right hemisphere. Dissociation is, furthermore, the fragmentation of what should be experienced as a whole – the mental separation of components of experience that would ordinarily be processed together, again suggesting a right-hemisphere problem. Core features of dissociation include amnesia for autobiographical information, identity disturbances, depersonalisation and derealisation (lack of the sense of the reality of the phenomenal world, which appears to be a two-dimensional projection). On first principles one would therefore expect this to be a right-hemisphere-deficit condition. And subjects with right-hemisphere damage do in fact report exactly this – a change in, and a foreignness of, the self, which is disconnected from the world, a loss of feeling of belonging in the world. At times they report having become insensible automata, puppets, or mere spectators, devoid of feelings and cut off from the surrounding world (one even reported that her head has been turned into a cone, but with the front part missing; other patients reported feeling themselves to be just a casing, or cover, their ‘I’ having been separated from them, located outside the body, somewhere nearby and to the left). Subjects almost invariably speak of ‘going to another space or place’.71

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71. Dobrokhotova & Bragina, 1977.

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Given all this, it would be extraordinary if dissociation in ‘normal’ subjects did not involve a disconnection from the right hemisphere, and an interhemispheric imbalance in favour of the left. And this is just what the empirical evidence shows.72 In fact in dissociation, the hemispheres are more than usually disengaged, with an effective ‘functional commissurotomy’, or disruption of functioning in the corpus callosum.73 Activation of the left hemisphere in subjects especially prone to dissociation results in faster than usual inhibition of the right hemisphere, whereas those not prone to dissociation exhibit a balanced interhemispheric inhibition, corroborating the idea that dissociation involves a functional superiority of the left hemisphere over the right hemisphere.74

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72. Spitzer, Willert, Grabe et al., 2004.

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73. Krystal, Bremner, Southwick et al., 1998.

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74. Spitzer, Willert, Grabe et al., 2004.

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The ultimately dissociative state is hypnosis. Despite popular prejudice that hypnosis is likely to involve the ‘release’ of the right hemisphere, it has none of the features that one would expect if it really were a state of right-hemisphere predominance. And indeed many imaging studies have now confirmed that there appears to be a predominance of left-sided activation during hypnosis.75 Being asked to imagine that a brightly coloured picture is black and white, and being hypnotised, so that we really come to believe that the picture is black and white, involve different brain states; and the difference is that, in the hypnotic state, there is abnormally increased activation in the left hemisphere.76 In hypnosis the right hemisphere is not activated, even during a typically ‘right-hemisphere’ task, using overall EEG power as the criterion.77 In a neuroimaging study exploring the neural correlates of hypnosis, activity decreases in the precuneus, posterior cingulate and right inferior parietal lobule,78 which is coherent, since as we saw earlier, in Chapter 2, these areas are known to be associated with the sense of individual agency.79 Furthermore, hypnosis produces an enhancement in focal concentration, together with a relative suspension of peripheral awareness, a mode of attention typical of the left hemisphere. It is, according to one source, ‘analogous to macular vision: intense and detailed, but restricted’, a perfect description of the left hemisphere field of vision.80 And in keeping with the left-hemisphere hypothesis, more hypnotisable subjects display higher levels of dopaminergic activity (dopamine transmission is more extensive in the left hemisphere).81

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75. Maquet, Faymonville, Degueldre et al., 1999; Jasiukaitis, Nouriani & Spiegel, 1996; Jasiukaitis, Nouriani, Hugdahl et al., 1997; Aleksandrowicz, Urbanik & Binder, 2006.

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76. Kosslyn, Thompson, Costantini-Ferrando et al., 2000.

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77. Edmonston & Moscovitz, 1990.

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78. Rainville, Hofbauer, Paus et al., 1999.

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79. Ruby & Decety, 2001.

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80. Spiegel & Spiegel, 1987, p. 23. And they continue: ‘It is perhaps no accident that tunnel vision … is associated with the high hypnotisability of hysterics. One responsive hypnotic subject informed us that she experienced tunnel vision every time she entered the hypnotic state.’

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81. Spiegel, 1991.

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So if I am right, that the story of the Western world is one of increasing left-hemisphere domination, we would not expect insight to be the key note. Instead we would expect a sort of insouciant optimism, the sleepwalker whistling a happy tune as he ambles towards the abyss.

I now want to turn to the influence of the divided brain on Western culture.

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Blake’s visionary poetry nonetheless dramatises in various forms a battle between two powerful forces that adopt different guises: the single-minded, limiting, measuring, mechanical power of what Blake called Ratio, the God of Newton, and the myriad-minded, liberating power of creative imagination, the God of Milton.

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(Blake: ‘all living things are holy’);